John Herbert takes a look at the design behind the new Aruba 8400 switch and why little things like airflow and linecard layout can help solve manufacturing issues. He also discusses how the new generation of switches like the 8400 can bring increased performance to locations that may not have the support of a full datacenter environment.
Exclusive
Exclusive content written just for Gestalt IT
Packet Works on ARM
Packet just announced an interesting partnership with ARM to launch Works on ARM. Basically, the partnership is based around expanding support for Armv8 processors in the data center.
Reconsidering DH2i with DxEnterprise 17
Orchestrated containerized database workloads for OS and infrastructure independence. That’s what DH2i is able to offer enterprises with the release of DxEnterprise 17. Previously limited to Windows-only, this new version of DxEnterprise may cause you to give DH2i another look.
Gestalt IT Giveaway: Win a 2017 Microsoft Surface Pro
We’re giving away a 2017 Microsoft Surface Pro on our Facebook page! Click for details.
Dell EMC Doubles Down on VMware Portfolio
Coming out of VMworld this year, we’re seeing some interesting announcements from Dell EMC. The company has refreshed and expanded a number of solutions in the end-to-end VMware portfolio, touching on everything from HCI to storage arrays.
Moving beyond the CLI with Aruba 8400 (Enabling SDN for NetOps)
When I first saw the Aruba 8400 I was awestruck, surprised, actually legitimately excited! I know, I know it’s just a bunch of ports inside of a chassis, but that’s not all it was though. The 8400 brought something to the party which has been forlorn and forgotten in the systemic world of Network Engineering and Administration, and that is they realized the end-users of this product WERE Network Engineers and Administrators. But wait, what do I mean by that?
Cupertino Expands in the Enterprise, Apple Partners with Accenture
Apple announced a partnership today with Accenture. If you’re not familiar, Accenture is a prominent consulting firm, which according to their website “partner(s) with more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500” (so at least 376). They’re the outsourcing solution for CTOs that want to modernize a creaky IT backend, but just want someone else to deal with the headaches.
ioFABRIC Vicinity 3.0: Storage Myth Making
If you’re not familiar with ioFABRIC, they make Vicinity, a data fabric solution that lets you get better utilization of all your storage. It does this by presenting applications with a virtual data plane that amalgamates all available storage. This is governed independently by their own control plane. Essentially, the virtual data plane presents to the application as whatever kind of storage it natively needs (block, file, SMB, etc.).
Up to date, ioFABRIC Vicinity has supported storage in your data center, whether it’s a SAN, SSDs, NVMe, or emerging NVDIMMs. But with their 3.0 release, they are fundamentally changing the product.
Lofty Goals for The Campus Core: Aruba 8400 Series and OS-CX
Aruba is making a big push with their new 8400 series data center switch. It’s a marvel of modern engineering with impressive hardware and software built to help modern enterprises succeed. Brandon Carroll takes a look at what makes the 8400 special and how it will help network professionals build on a platform for the future.
AMD Threadripper X399 Motherboards RANKED (by tackiness)
AMD’s X399 is an unsubtle chipset for its unsubtle Threadripper CPUs. Luckily, AMD’s OEM partners are up to the challenge to design motherboards up to this standard. The initial batch are extremely high end, loaded with every feature imaginable. The one thing they all lack? Tasteful design. We’ve ranked the X399 launch motherboards by sheet tackiness, so you don’t have to.