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Archived Networking Articles
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28 Jul 2011
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Andy Bechtolsheim Casts His Vote for Merchant Silicon [24388]
The Stuff that 10GB Ethernet Switches Are Made of
Merchant silicon gets Andy Bechtolsheim's vote as the technology for Ethernet switches. He writes that throughput and cost-performance factors make merchant silicon the winner, hands down. This is reflected in the fact that, according to him, most of the 10 Gigabyte (GB) switches manufactured in the current year are based on merchant silicon. Given the network scalability demands of contemporary datacenters, Bechtolsheim writes, only 10 GB Ethernet will do as the switch. He also comments on the features of Arista's 7050-64S and compares them to those of Cisco's Catalyst 6509, asserting that the features gap between the two is closing.
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11 Jul 2011
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Do We Really Want 100Gig Ethernet? [24321]
Alan Stevens Thinks the Answer Is a Resounding Yes
"Do we really want 100Cig Ethernet?" asks Alan Stevens in "The Register," and he answers his rhetorical question with a resounding yes, citing two principal reasons: The need to support increasingly bandwidth-greedy applications, such as video streaming and private cloud computing, and the growth in server virtualization and the hardware consolidation that goes with it is an even more compelling consideration, he writes. He then goes on to elaborate, writing, " ... the more virtual machines a physical server has to host, the smaller the share of the available network bandwidth each is likely to get, even when it is sliced up and dynamically allocated using sophisticated virtual networking software." So, do we need it, Stevens says, yes, and soon, perhaps as early as 2015.
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26 May 2011
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ipadm: New Solaris 11 Command for Administering IP Interfaces [24209]
Gives ipconfig a Run for Its Money
ipadm is a new command in Solaris 11 for administering IP interfaces. It is an upgrade over the venerable ifconfig though, unlike ifconfig, changes made with ipadm persist across reboots, according to Brian Leonard's blog. With this change, he explains, users need no longer contend with configuration files. Even so, he writes, while ipconfig has not gone away, ipadm shows a much cleaner interface that has persuaded him to work increasingly with the new command.
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29 Mar 2011
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Oracle Solaris 11 Express Networking Virtualization Technology [24037]
Explore the Potential of Project Crossbow
Oracle is featuring the network virtualization technology available in Project Crossbow, a new, powerful network stack architecture. Project Crossbow delivers the ability to perform network virtualization with Virtual NICs and virtual switching, as well as the creation of VNICs on physical NICs and the ability to link aggregations for high availability or the use of "etherstubs" to form hardware-independent virtual switches. Further capabilities in Project Crossbow include the ability to tightly integrate with oracle Solaris Zones and Oracle Solaris 10 Zones. Network resource management is efficient; integrated QoS is easy to manage, given the ability to enforce bandwidth limits on VNICs and traffic flows. Project Crossbow is an optimized network stack that reacts to network load levels and enables users to build a "datacenter in a box." Links to numerous resources including podcasts, videos, training sessions, and white papers are available at the above link.
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17 Mar 2011
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Surveying the Business of Bandwidth (and the Insatiable Demand for More of It) [24012]
A Register Artcile by Alan Stevens
Among the many changes over recent years involving IT technology, there has been at least one constant, and that is the demand for more and more bandwidth, a demand vendors have been hard at work to satisfy. Alan Stevens, writing in The Register considers the multiple developments around bandwidth and provides some perspective on what to expect in the coming decade. Among the items under discussion 40 GbE; 100 GbE; Terabit networking technologies; iSCSI storage networking; Fibre Channel over Ethernet; and, oh yes, Wi-Fi. Some or all of which can be expected to put in an appearance at a datacenter near you in the not to distant future.
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08 Mar 2011
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Virtual Network - Part 4 [23994]
Resource Controls
Continuing his series on Virtual Network, Jeff Victory blogs on Resource Controls, in which he demonstrates the use of a bandwidth cap on Virtual Network Elements, enabling the imposition of limits on the amount of bandwidth consumed by a particular stream of packets.
According to Victor, the bandwidth cap is the simplest resource control among the several network virtualization tools in Solaris 11 Express. He concludes that both physical NICs and virtual NICs may be capped by using this simple method, which can also be applied to workloads that are in Solaris Zones - both default zones and Solaris 10 Zones which mimic Solaris 10 systems.
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