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Recent Posts
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TRILL Q&A: Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Our recent post on TRILL and SPB standards sparked some interesting questions from reader Chris Young, a Solutions Architect at Hewlett-Packard, particularly around the decision process. Others may have the same curiosity, so here’s my take on the situation. Continue reading
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Ethernet Fabric 101 Q&A Series: Part Two – Standards: TRILL and SPB
In Brocade’s recent Ethernet Fabric 101 workshops in San Diego and Austin, participants’ chatter around standards TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links) and SPB (Shortest Path Bridging) lead us to answer some crucial question in our latest installment of the Ethernet Fabric 101 Q&A Series. We’ve recapped the discussion and provided answers to their questions that you may be asking yourselves as well. Continue reading
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The Church of Production
It’s 4am, on Saturday. You got in at 2am after sleeping for a lovely 1.5hrs. Monitor glow on your face, your jaw tightening up for a nice big yawn as you are pouring through logs.
What changed? When was the last reboot? What versions are running? Does anyone in engineering have root access? What patches have been applied? What happened right before the downtime? Have we seen this before…..? Continue reading
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Calling All Candidates: Here’s The Jobs Network
In the 700-odd debates of the Republican primary season so far, the most common word, by a long way, is ‘jobs.’ It’s what the public wants, and it’s what each candidate promises to deliver. But stepping outside of that electoral process, what’s really happening in the market? We got a good hint on the morning of February 3rd when the U.S. Labor Department came out with its newest statistics, and they make for interesting reading. While government agencies have been cutting jobs, the private sector has been adding them at a remarkable pace. Continue reading
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The Data Center Fabric Checklist: Eight indications that a data center fabric can help you now
The term “fabric” has become the latest buzzword to hit the networking industry. The concept is strategically important to any organization serious about maximizing the value of virtualization in their data centers. Many different vendors offer a data center fabric strategy today. Most of the network vendors such as Brocade, Cisco, Juniper, Extreme, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Extreme and Enterasys have all rolled out network based fabrics, but one of the more interesting alternatives comes from Xsigo which unveiled its server-based fabric. Network or server based, its clear the architecture in the data center is changing. As IT organizations evaluate these varying solutions, it’s important to take a step back and determine why it would make sense for a company to deploy data center fabrics. I’ve provided eight compelling reasons to make that decision. Continue reading
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A Note from AJ, or Where’s the Beef?
Today, I got a note from a friend of mine, AJ. AJ spends a lot of his time talking with customers all over the world. He has a great vantage point from which to gauge the interest in emerging technologies by customers and their level of deployment. He brought up an interesting observation about converged networks. Continue reading
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Clash of the New Network Titans?
In my previous post, I promised to consider the topic of Ethernet Fabrics “versus” OpenFlow. See, some folks have claimed that OpenFlow and Ethernet Fabrics are both intended to solve the same problem. One category of futuristic-über-champion-from-another-planet envisions OpenFlow/SDN as fully displacing all network-based intelligence. By that perspective, OpenFlow competes with every existing network-based protocol. Sure, and maybe someday I might get you to buy an entirely different kind of bridge from me. Continue reading
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State of the Ethernet Union
In light of the President of the United States (POTUS) delivering his SOTU last week, we thought we’d take a few moments to reflect on the state of things in the networking world. Unlike the POTUS, however, it’s hard to deliver a singular view of the state of things as the networking world is highly fractured by different technologies and customer segments. Let’s just say that we tend to operate more on the principles found in the Articles of Confederation than the Constitution. But here it goes, courtesy of Network World’s coverage of Dell’Oro Group’s market update. Continue reading
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Ethernet Fabric 101 Q&A Series: Part One
This is part one of a series that highlights common questions in Brocade’s Ethernet Fabric 101 Workshops. Continue reading
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Brains Applied to Big Data: The Business is the Fabric
If most applications and their data act like self-contained single cell organisms, then Big Data is the new multi-cellular organism. To work efficiently, it requires brain-like connective tissue neurons can dynamically and quickly connect together as needed to process more information. Continue reading
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The foundation for virtualized data centers and cloud-optimized networks.
