Tony Bourke really stirred up a hornets’ nest with this one! Who would have thought that “storage NAT” would be so controversial?

NPIV and NPV are among the two most ill-named of acronyms I’ve come across in IT, especially since they sound very similar, yet do two fairly different things. NPIV is an industry-wide term and is short for N_Port ID Virtualization, and NPV is a Cisco-specific term, and is short for N_Port Virtualization. Huh? Yeah, not only do they sound similar, but the names give very little indication as to what they do.

He followed up with a second post on analogies for NPV/NPIV…

When comparing Fibre Channel to Ethernet/IP, it’s important to remember that they are different. In fact, significantly different. The only purpose for relating Fibre Channel to Ethernet/IP is for the purpose of relating those who are familiar with Ethernet/IP to the world of Fibre Channel.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | NPV and NPIV
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Google built their own switches using merchant silicon. Now they’ve built their own routers, and they’re using OpenFlow between the control and data plane. Here’s Ivan Pepelnjak’s take on the news, the hype, and the reality.

Google is (as far as I know) the first one that implemented the end-to-end system: gathering application needs, computing paths, and installing them in the routers in real time.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | OpenFlow @ Google: Brilliant, but not revolutionary
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It doesn’t sound like Ivan Pepelnjak is all that enthusiastic about Brocade’s OpenFlow/SDN strategy. It’s not that he sees a problem with the strategy itself, just the “us first” marketing tone…

It’s nice to see OpenFlow support on yet another platform and MLX is one of the few (if not the first) OpenFlow platforms with 100 GE interfaces … but I fail to see anything exciting in the rest of the strategy. However, I know Brocade has great engineers (who will likely get upset halfway down this blog post) and interesting products, so I hope to be proven wrong..

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | Brocade: Yet Another SDN Strategy
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Kennedy apparently did say that the employee headcount at the company is likely to be reduced through layoffs, attrition, and “restructuring,” the last of which typically results in layoffs. He also reportedly said Avaya had too many locations, which suggests that geographic consolidation is in the cards.

…

Speaking of cuts, reports that HP might be shedding a whopping eight percent of its staff are troubling. Remember, HP is a company that was headed by Mark Hurd, a CEO notorious for his operational austerity. Hurd wielded the sharp budgetary implements so exuberantly, he must have brought tears to the eyes of Chainsaw Al Dunlap, former CEO of Sunbeam, who, like Hurd, was ousted under dubious circumstances.

via nerdtwilight.wordpress.com

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | Last Week’s Leavings: Avaya and HP | Twilight in the Valley of the Nerds
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Read more:

• Five Functional Facts about FabricPath
• Five Features of Brocade VCS

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | Cisco FabricPath vs. Brocade VCS
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We have long wondered if Cisco would move into storage. As Brad points out here, there’s no easy way for them to do it without a major rift forming, as happened with UCS, HP, and Dell. Buying NetApp would work, as would buying a smaller storage company and trying to compete in the open market. But either way, Cisco doesn’t have an easy road into storage.

Brad Casemore takes on the question from his perspective in networking and comes away unconvinced.

Recent commentary from Barclays Capital analyst Jeff Kvaal has me wondering whether  Cisco might push into the storage market. In turn, I’ve begun to think about a strategic drift at Cisco that has been apparent for the last few years.

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2012. | Cisco’s Storage Trap by Brad Casemore
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Ekahau and MetaGeek are working together to bring Wi-Fi site surveying and spectrum analysis to the masses in a portable format

The most interesting products and companies at Interop Las Vegas 2011 were found around the edges of the show floor. Companies like NEC, Synology, Ciphertex, and Endace may have gone unnoticed in the shadows of towering booths of the industry titans but deserve attention. One such pairing was two Wi-Fi analysis companies, MetaGeek and Ekahau. Both work together to enable spectrum analysis and site surveying on portable devices – smart phones and tablets.

MetaGeek Makes Spectrum Accessible

One of my personal favorite presentations at Wireless Field Day in March was the awesome startup tale told by Ryan Woodings, founder of MetaGeek. While working on a wireless mouse dongle, Ryan and company noticed RF interference and turned lemons into lemonade: They repurposed the USB dongle as a spectrum analyzer and started a company to make this formerly esoteric technology accessible.

Although MetaGeek’s Wi-Spy is nowhere near as full-featured as the big guys, it’s far more accessible at 1/10 the cost. It’s cheap enough that a home hobbyist could pick one up as a way to learn about Wi-Fi and 2.4 and 5 GHz wireless spectrum. And the Windows software is easy enough that even a storage guy like me could figure out that my home Wi-Fi router was on the wrong channel.

At Tech Field Day, Ryan wowed the crowd with an early peek at an iPad app to interact with Wi-Spy captures. I ran into Ryan at Interop, and he showed me a more-polished version of that app, promising it would hit the App Store soon. He also hinted that an iPhone version would follow, and showed off email and Dropbox integration.

Ekahau Site Survey: Laptop to Android

MetaGeek had a guest in their booth from another company I’d heard of from my Wi-Fi engineer friends: Ekahau makes site survey products for laptops and was talking about an Android version as well. Ekahau’s Mobile Survey supports a variety of Android devices, including the popular Samsung Galaxy Tab and Motorola Droid.

Stephen’s Stance

Wireless Field Day exposed me to a whole new world of enterprise IT. The wireless engineers there spend days roaming through corporate facilities doing site surveys, planning Wi-Fi access point installations, and troubleshooting connectivity and interference. Most use Windows laptops, but it’s exciting to think that Apple iPhones and iPads and Android phones and tablets may also be used in the future. These devices are much more portable, with great battery life and interactive screens. And it looks like MetaGeek and Ekahau are leading the way. I can’t wait to get an update from these companies at Wireless Field Day 2 in early 2012!

© Stephen Foskett for Gestalt IT, 2011. | MetaGeek and Ekahau: Wi-Fi Analysis To Go
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However, that was then and this is now. Suddenly, we have budgets and business sees value in investing in a cost-center, like IT. The business is growing. More and more traffic is passing over the WAN and the profile has changed drastically. Voice traffic, ICA/RDP, backup needs, and just plain more data is increasing the load on the network. Plus, we have new offices opening in places where getting a static IP address is extremely expensive and not realistic.

The network was designed a decade ago and it is becoming time to remodel so we can continue to grow. The issue becomes how. Which change is going to provide the biggest bang for our buck?

We have the backing and we believe we have made some core infrastructure purchases that allows us to operate right now and grow into the future.

So… where do we go from here?

• Dynamic Routing Protocol: Static routes have been great as we use a hub-and-spoke model for the time being. However, as we expand into China and Europe, the networking design will need to change and routing will become more and more important. Something like EIGRP will probably be the best fit for us.
• Inter-office communications: Some offices have MPLS connections. Others do not… so, their communications travel all over the world to reach other offices. Being able to bring up VPN tunnels on demand to facilitate more point-to-point connectivity is going to be important. Hello DMVPN. Sure, I can create VPN configurations on each office router for other office routers, but that becomes increasingly difficult and monotonous as a new office comes onboard and the branch offices can only handle so many connections.
• Geographic routing blocks: Conceptually, just having geographic regions in the same IP addressing area makes for simpler routing. That means re-IPing a handful of offices to meet the needs.
• Regional hubs: Does it make sense to aggregate core services in a single location or create regional hubs and focus on higher performing hub-to-hub communications. I believe the answer is ‘Yes’!

All of this is really showing me a brief glimpse into the pains and considerations that really need to take place to create a more mature networking environment. Concepts like:

• Router hardware limitation (CPU availability, encryption offloading, etc…)
• Router limitations impact on network throughput
• Resiliency design
• Limitations and Advantages of various routing protocols
• Packets Per Second (versus they typical Mbps style measurement)
• plus much more!

Based on my research, this is the next logical step for us to move. I am sure there are 1 million other ways to go (always open to comments). But, as long as I try to be forward looking and pay more attention to the little details, we should be good to go!

Implementing the options from above sounds like a lot of fun. My inner geek is squee’ing with excitement. Hopefully, these projects will turn into reality and we can begin using a smarter, larger, and more robust network in the near future.

© Bill for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Growing Pains: Network Scaling And Maturation
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Symantec

The first portion of the session covered the NetBackup product. While I agree that the product sounds great, I appreciate the level of detail that the presenters were able to offer. The second portion covered the BackupExec product. I am a little more familiar with this product as my day job fits perfectly in their target market. However, there was much more marketing talk in this presentation for our liking. We like details versus marketing.

Curtis Preston commented that the biggest mistake a backup admin can make is to rip and replace their backup solution. So, while I am not about to jump ship on what we have right now, I am going to consider making a jump to BackupExec or NetBackup when the time comes. I like what Symantec is bringing to the table and I can see why they are a/the major player in their field.

Drobo

Talk about a cool company… Drobo is just that… absolutely cool. Prior to the TFD presentation, Drobo made an announcement that they are presenting a new business oriented product, the 12-bay Drobo for Business. We were allowed to be the first group of people to see the insides of the SAN outside of Drobo employees. How cool is that! Plus, Mario is the next best thing to Billy Mays. Seriously, I think his presentation skills were great. Seeing people so enthused about their products makes the product that much more appealing.

I am concerned, though, about the feature set of the new line, though. I appreciate their identification of their place in the storage world. They are not trying to compete with EMC, NetApp, etc… in the corporate environment. They recognize that and target the smaller markets heavily. However, the functions and design decisions for the new business quality arrays are questionable. Making these decisions for small businesses with little/no IT staff makes some sense. However, trying to move into business areas with IT staff and no enterprise management available makes it difficult to penetrate into the environment. Plus, having single controllers with NICs built in to it makes it a difficult pill to swallow for enterprises.

Drobo is not going away with their existing market. But, I hope they are able to make some more business level changes to appeal to a larger business market.

Druva

Tech Field Day always seems to have surprises… and the introduction of a new company was great. Although, I must say that I question the “new-ness” of Druva seeing as they already have a large amount of customers in 26 countries (or so).

The laptop/mobile backup product they are peddling seems fairly compelling… especially the user empowerment to retrieve their own data without IT intervention. We were unable to see a proper demo of the product features as the limited network connectivity (via the MiFi) was hamstringing the demo. But, what we did see looks to be fairly cool. I really liked the thought they put into the client portion. Not only was the client deduplicating the data and sending the changes to the backup storage, but the ability to have a backup upon startup of the device was great. The startup function includes logic to wait until X amount of time after startup and for the load on the laptop to drop to a usable level. The last thing they wanted was for the backup service to start during startup and make the laptop experience horrible.

The ability to interact with the backup environment via an iPad is nice proof of concept. But, I did not get the sense of true functionality that the iPad provides. Until the iPad can be a backup source, I would stick to laptops.

Where I run into a problem is that this is a secondary tier backup environment and there needs to be a way to backup the backup. While Druva client backups are deduplicated on their server, the server files are such that makes the deduplication into a primary storage environment difficult.

I see the value in laptop backup and a product like Druva. But, I cannot justify the additional backup environment when many existing backup environments can handle laptop backups now. A Druva solution would be added for user convenience, but policies exist to ensure users save their data in locations that are accessible via the primary backup environment. If the Druva server died… meh.

Xangati

I am glad to see that Xangati was able to get involved with TFD! Their product is an amazing addition to the virtual admin utility belt. Seeing statistics with this much detail and history is extremely useful. Plus, being able to identify “events” and having the data available in a DVR style makes it super useful and intuitive. Not only are the events and DVR great, Xangati took the concept further and allow VDI users to create “events” when they feel the VDI environment is not working as expected. Now, the users can alert to performance issues that may become difficult to identify by the VDI admin!

Xangati looks like a great company for another company to pick up. My first reaction to seeing this was VMware’s acquisition of Integrien for monitoring and analysis. So, while this handles VMware well, VMware is not necessarily in the market to pick them up. I can see Citrix or Microsoft loving what they see and picking them up as a way to battle against VMware. If/when this happens, that company will have an amazing tool at their disposal.

NetEx (or HyperIP)

WAN acceleration is always something that intrigued me. Companies like Riverbed and Citrix (with WAN Scaler) make sense because they store copies of data on the device and, essentially, deduplicate the data so it is not sent across the WAN. So, the NetEx approach was interesting. In my network-light world, using UDP and aggregating the data into larger chunks is an interesting method.

NetEx used beer as an analogy for what they do. Normal networks send data in beer bottles. However, rather than send beer bottles around and track all of them, NetEx sends the beer in a keg and pushes the keg around the network. Then, once it reaches the destination network, HyperIP will break the kegs back into bottles. That made perfect sense to me! Plus, they left the beer for those drinkers in our group!

I am not entirely sure where this would fit in my everyday life. But, based on my simpleton reaction to their product and the network guys like of the product, I think there is definitely something to it.

Infoblox

This was the most difficult presentation for me to sit through… reason being that I really felt like they were creating FUD around what is a fairly simple issue… assigning IP addresses and DNS. Plus, it took forever to get to that point. However, once the fluff was pushed aside, the Infoblox product looks great. With a simple demo, the true value of their product really stepped forward and I began to see how it may fit in an environment like my everyday workplace.

HP

The HP presentations were very interesting. The first presentation dealt with HP’s commitment to standards and modularity to ensure convergence in the datacenter. However, that was short lived as the following presentations dealt with their new deduplication product which appeared to become a proprietary solution (not quite in line with their standards in the datacenter) and some proprietary networking.

Coming into Tech Field Day, I was really amped to hear what HP was going to present on… especially with our being on their corporate campus. I was a little let down with what I saw and that most of the speakers were in the Marketing department.

However, the datacenter tour at the end of the day was really valuable. I was able to ask some questions of the datacenter manager about different product lines. I must admit that I am not an active HP customer. So, I was a little naive as to what they offered.

Conclusion

Tech Field Day #5 was amazing. The group of delegates I was surrounded by were amazing and I walked away with so much information from them and because of them. I appreciate all of the presentations and the time/resources that the presenting companies provided to have us onsite. I cannot wait to see what happens to the companies and the products they presented!

© Bill for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Virtual Bill’s Tech Field Day 5 Review
Read more posts categorized as Networking, Server Virtualization, Storage

The concept of a controller based LAN network is a powerful idea, and the OpenFlow Network Foundation has participation from large networking vendors, large cloud providers and big data companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and so forth. This provides some validation that the technology is of keen interest.

Recently, venture capital funding has been moving into startups working on this technology.

Ivan and Greg both agree that this is potentially a game changing technology, especially for cloud networking with the potential to disrupt significant parts of the networking industry.

Show Notes

You can Matt Davey’s blog here.

OpenFlow Website Openflow coming to Interop

Openflow project at Stanford Uni recorded a number of videos which have great demonstrations of where the product is today.

Greg’s article on TCAM can be found here

Venture capitals has funded Big Switch to develop software in this are.

This company iwNetworks makes switch hardware for Cloud networks.

Details on the OpenVswitch and their announced support for OpenFlow. This is hugely interesting if you are a cloud provider and the ability to tie your virtual switches with the configuration of the your physical switches is a powerful tool. Open vSwitch is an equivalent

Speakers

You can Matt Davey’s blog here.

Name: Ivan Pepelnjak

Web: http://blog.ioshints.info Twitter: @ioshints

Name: Greg Ferro

Web: www.etherealmind.comTwitter: @etherealmind

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© Etherealmind for Gestalt IT, 2011. | Show 40 – Openflow – Upending the Network Industry
Read more posts categorized as Favorites, Networking