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Tag Archives: network
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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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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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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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The Grass Isn’t Always Greener on the LAN Side
A friend of mine who spends a lot of time with data center LAN and SAN admins has been telling me for a long time that SAN admins have a better life. SAN admins supposedly get paged less and when they go home after work, they stay home, while LAN admins are always getting pages in the middle of the night and fighting fires. To help prove his point, he took an informal poll and found that SAN admins typically log into their network roughly once every 4-6 WEEKS while LAN admins need to log into their network 4-5 times PER DAY!
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What Networking Needs to Learn from Steve Jobs
What can networking learn from Steve Jobs? Essentially — better design, more intuitive technology and a general openness to routers, switches and growing technologies in this field. Exclusivity does not lead to success, but rather a niche technology and networking should understandable to everyone. Continue reading
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Don’t Overlook Your Network Foundation
Buildings require foundations. However, most people don’t see them, and therefore, don’t think much about them. Yet, foundations are critical. They are built before any other part of the structure and if they aren’t laid correctly, then constructing the rest…
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Chip Clip: Why Application Managers Hate Subnets
As Brocade Solutioneer, Chip Copper explains, Ethernet fabrics are about making the network work for the application – not the other way around! Novel concept perhaps in the networking world today, but an idea whose time has certainly come. Do…
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The foundation for virtualized data centers and cloud-optimized networks.
