The Lippis Report

June 7th, 2011

In Lippis Report 172, I mentioned three huge trends that are starting to interact with each other creating a perfect storm that is gripping the tech industry. One of those trends is the creation of a software ecosystem in the networking market, thanks to the Clean Slate program out of Stanford University that has spawned the Software Defined Network (SDN) initiative and open controller protocol called OpenFlow. I spent a week in the Valley talking to people at Stanford and many industry executives from Cisco, Juniper, Marvell, Big Switch, Nicira, Arista, IBM and others. In this Lippis Report Research Note, I share with you what I learned. OpenFlow-based SDN is being both hyped and in its current state, limited, but it does represent a new paradigm that has the industry abuzz, filled with possibilities.

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June 7th, 2011

In the world of High-Frequency Trading (HFT), opportunities exist only fleetingly and therefore trading solutions must run at the lowest latency to be competitive. Low-latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet has become the interconnect of choice for HFT solutions. IBM® and Mellanox® have demonstrated a solution that performs at high throughput rates and low latency to facilitate High-Frequency Trading solutions.

May 24th, 2011

Three strong trends are taking shape that are so powerful they threaten the status quo of the networking industry. These trends are more like storms than new markets; in fact they represent a major industry discontinuity. The first storm is happening now and is represented by merchant silicon for 10 and 40 GbE chips lowering the barrier of entry for new entrants in the Ethernet switch market. The second storm is much weaker but promises to be just as big, or bigger, than the first. This second storm is the creation of a software ecosystem in the networking industry, thanks to initiatives such as Software Defined Networks (SDN), OpenFlow, Arista Network’s EOS Central, etc. The third storm is the paradigm shift in enterprise IT spending thanks to mobile and cloud computing. These three storms are starting to interact and feed upon each other, forming a perfect storm in the networking industry. The perfect storm is already doing damage, as all major IT firms position product portfolios to navigate through it and prepare for its aftermath of making existing networking legacy.

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May 24th, 2011

By Extreme Networks

This white paper is targeted to enterprise and service provider IT managers who may be evaluating the ability of iSCSI SANs to satisfy the performance requirements of their most demanding storage applications. Storage application performance is dependent on more than just the performance of the storage array. The full data path and the integration with the other layers of the data center architecture must be taken into consideration. Optimizing the full data path from the server, through the network to the storage can contribute to significant improvements in performance and service levels.

This white paper and the accompanying configuration guide details the work of Intel, Extreme Networks® and NetApp to demonstrate the impact on iSCSI performance in real-world environments, using Extreme Networks CLEAR-Flow technology to help you achieve optimal iSCSI performance.

The output of the collaborative testing is presented in two separate documents:

• White Paper: provides an overview of the latest advancements around iSCSI SAN capabilities and performance, including real world, end-to-end performance results with CLEAR-Flow.

• Configuration Guide: provides a sample reference architecture with step-by-step configuration details for all the components and describes the end-to-end solution performance across a number of configurations.

April 11th, 2011

By BLADE Network Technologies, an IBM Company

Private clouds describe an architecture in which servers and networks in the data center can rapidly respond to changing demands, by quickly scaling compute capacity and connecting that server capacity where it is needed. The technology underlying this fluidity is server virtualization, which by now has been established as a reliable and essential core technology for most data centers. Five critical networking technologies are needed to build a private cloud network:

• Up to 1.28Tbps of line-rate, loss-less bandwidth
• Single-wire networks for data and storage with DCB support
• Support for thousands of virtual ports
• Virtual machine awareness
• Extremely low power requirements

This white paper details a cloud network architecture that incorporates these five success factors.

March 28th, 2011

In the Lippis Report, we have discussed the fundamental changes shaping a new data center network architecture. These drivers are massive virtualization, a sea change in traffic patterns that are now dominated with east-west flows on top of existing north-south traffic, ultra low latency, the emergence of cloud spec data centers, etc. As a result, data center networking attributes are changing with requirements of traffic, steering in virtualized infrastructure, avoiding manual network changes as VMs move, removing oversubscription (thanks to spanning tree), streamlining network tiers to hasten east-west traffic flows, etc. The industry is responding to these changes and requirements with new approaches to data center networking, such as the Open Networking Foundation, Cisco’s FabricPath, Juniper’s QFabric, Brocade’s VCS, Avaya’s VENA, Nicira Networks’ network virtualization software, etc. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we explore a key technology to enabling two-tier network fabrics, and that’s link aggregation and its various approaches, including Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation Group, Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) and Shortest Path Bridging (SPB).

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March 28th, 2011

By BLADE Networking Technologies, an IBM Company

Today, virtualization, cloud computing and high frequency trading place new demands on the system network fabric to deliver non-stop, ultra low-latency traffic flows. This traffic is increasingly “east-west” in nature to enable machine-to-machine communications versus the “north-south” traffic that characterizes conventional client/server and Web-based application environments. To deliver this east-west traffic using the most efficient flows, large flat networks are becoming increasingly popular. These flat Layer 2 networks eliminate extra hops to decrease latency, do not block any paths across the network, and are simple to configure. Such flat networks are built with large numbers of inexpensive top-of-rack switches, scale horizontally by simply adding more switches, and enable VLANs to span across a data center to provide larger server pools for virtualization. TRILL or TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links is fundamental to IBM’s approach and is explained in this white paper.

February 28th, 2011

The data center switching market is heating up. To address the scale issues posed by mobile and cloud computing nearly every network vendor is launching its own version of a 10/40/100 GbE fabric to connect servers and storage to the internet. At the heart of this fabric is a two-tier (Fat-Tree) network made up of leaf/ToR and spine/Core switches. Here leafs connect servers and spines connect leafs while also being interconnected in a logical mesh. The protocols to create this logical mesh are based upon IS-IS link state routing, but each vendor is taking a unique approach with Cisco using its FastPath, Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya using SPB (802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging) while Brocade VDX is based upon TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links). Juniper recently announced QFabric but has not detailed what it’s using for logical meshing. At the center of new data center design are leaf and spine switches. In Lippis Report Research Note 166, we detailed the latest ToR switches. In this Lippis Report Research Note 167, we dive into performance and power consumption measurements plus the use of SPB of Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch 10K, a new entry into spine/core data center switching market.

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February 28th, 2011

By Cisco Systems

Deploying network services in virtual data centers is extremely challenging. Traditionally, such Layer 4 through 7 services relied on intrusive, inline deployment and static network topologies. They were thus completely at odds with highly scalable virtual data center designs with mobile workloads, on-demand virtual machine (VM) provisioning, and strict service-level agreements (SLAs).

Cisco® Unified Network Services (UNS) addresses all of these problems by creating a framework for multiple services that can be configured and provisioned on demand, dynamically, to suit the service needs of enterprise applications and cloud users. This dramatically reduces network management overhead, allowing for a much more agile data center and business while providing improved application performance and a secure infrastructure. Cisco UNS comprises Cisco’s industry-leading solutions for virtual data centers that deliver.

● Load balancing and application controllers
● WAN acceleration
● Network security
● Network analysis and monitoring

February 14th, 2011

During December 6-10, 2010, the Lippis Report and Ixia conducted the industry’s first 10GbE data center switching evaluation of Top-of-Rack and Core Ethernet switches at the modern iSimCity lab in Santa Clara, CA. We evaluated Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch 10K, Arista’s 7504 Series Data Center Switch, BLADE Network Technologies’, an IBM Company, IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124 and IBM BNT RackSwitch G8264, Force10 Network’s S-Series S4810, Hitachi Cable’s Apresia 15000-64XL-PSR, Juniper Network’s EX Series EX8216 Ethernet Switch and Voltaire®’s Vantage™ 6048. We are conducting a second round of test scheduled for the week of April 4-8 at iSimCity, and it is open to all suppliers of 10GbE data center switching. We learned a lot about these products, both in the lab and out. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we dive into the Top-of-Rack 10GbE switches we tested as they represent a new generation of products that exhibit low power consumption, low latency, high performance and are all based upon new single chip designs from Broadcom, Marvell or Fulcrum Micro.

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February 14th, 2011

By Ken Won, Director of Product Marketing at Force10 Networks

Server and storage environments have seen a lot of changes in the past ten years, while developments in networking have remained fairly static. Now, the demands of virtualization and network convergence are driving significant changes in the data center network. Networks have always been considered as plumbing that connect servers and storage, but new, dynamic switches are changing the network’s role in the overall data center. It’s not your father’s network anymore, and savvy data center managers need to understand and plan for the changes that are coming.

This white paper discusses new network technologies, explains what they are, and suggests how to plan for them in future data center architectures.

February 14th, 2011

By Arista Networks

While servers and applications have fully embraced the concepts of automation, sadly the network infrastructure, on which they all rely, is still mired in legacy technologies. Current methodology, such as CLI, requires extensive hands-on provisioning and configuration by knowledgeable personnel. In modern cloud infrastructure, network managers must be able to centralize provisioning and configuration roles to improve reliability, minimize bring-up costs, and contain the expenses of creating a cloud data center service. Whether you are looking to maximize the efficiency and reliability of your existing operations, or you are looking to take advantage of a cloud-based infrastructure, fully automated provisioning is an essential capability, and Arista’s Zero Touch provisioning offers the first approach to automated network configuration.

January 31st, 2011

by Lippis Report Testing

This report details the test results of the Force10 Networks S-Series S4810 enterprise Top-of-Rack (ToR) Ethernet switch. All 48 10GbE ports of the Force10 Networks S-Series S4810 are populated and tested for performance, throughput, latency and power consumption. The Force10 Networks S-Series S4810 test results are then compared against IBM BNT RackSwitch G8264, Voltaire Vantageâ„¢ 6048 and Apresia 15K ToR switches.

To download the test report please CLICK HERE

January 31st, 2011

by Lippis Report Testing

This report details the test results of the IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124 & G8264 enterprise Top-of-Rack (ToR) Ethernet switches. All 24 and 64 10GbE ports of the IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124 & G8264, respectively, are populated and tested for performance, throughput, latency and power consumption. The IBM BNT RackSwitch G8124 & G8264’s test results are then compared against Force10 Networks S4810, Voltaire Vantage™ 6048 and Apresia 15K ToR switches.

To download the test report please CLICK HERE