RSSNews and Analysis
Forecast: 10GbE To Be The Top-Selling Ethernet Switch By 2016
Sales of 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) Ethernet Switches are expected to reach $13 billion by 2016 and will constitute nearly half of a total $28 billion Ethernet Switch market by then, a forecast from the research firm Dell'Oro Group states. And even as data center operators upgrade from 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) Switches to 10GbE in order to handle exponentially larger volumes of network data traffic, sales of even faster 40GbE and 100GbE switches will also be picking up as well.
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Architectures
Time to Reconsider the Data Center
As enterprises push out data centers into cloud-based computing and virtual applications, traditional data center planning and practices haven't necessarily kept pace. Is it time to reshape definitions of classic brick-and-mortar data centers into a new computing concept with different performance and total-cost-of-ownership expectations? If nothing else, the business cases now driving data center services are beginning to demand it. "As a global organization, we know that we must not only provide 24/7 IT, but also enterprise-strength IT support on a follow-the-sun basis," said John Heller, CIO of Caterpillar.
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Reviews & Workshops
Freeware Increases RJ Lee's Management Efficiency
Faced with rapid growth and increases in the amount and complexity of data and its IT operations, RJ Lee Group went looking for a way to simplify its computing infrastructure. The company selected Spiceworks as an alternative to adding staff or spending a lot of money on network and system management software.
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Blogs
Scale Computing: New Twists to Scale-Out Storage for the Mid-Market
January 27, 2012 3:30 PM
Posted by David Hill
Startup Scale Computing delivers scale-out, unified storage for the mid-market, meaning users can access SAN/NAS resources from the same, scalable pool of disk storage. Scale is by no means alone in doing that, but Scale goes beyond just delivering storage in a box to delivering a data center in a storage box! And that is very interesting.
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Alas Poor Virtensys, I Knew Virtual I/O Horatio
January 25, 2012 10:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
I must admit I was one of those folks that were intrigued by the idea of I/O virtualization. I led sessions at conferences exploring the various ways one could connect their servers and peripherals to each other. The very idea that I could share expensive resources like RAID controllers and network connections from a shared pool seemed like a path to the flexibility I always wanted. Apparently most of you disagreed as at least one I/O virtualization pioneer, Virtensys, bit the dust this week.
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Meraki Ups The Cloud-Based Networking Ante
January 23, 2012 10:10 AM
Posted by Lee H. Badman
Mainstream network players and those chasing them are out to erase the lines between wireless and wired networking. As the network edge gets redefined and the cloud makes its presence felt in LAN and WLAN spaces, announcements like Meraki's latest update are getting to be more commonplace--and exciting. With a number of interesting product updates to share, Meraki is starting 2012 with a bang.
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Thought Experiment--Forget ROI
January 23, 2012 9:50 AM
Posted by Joe Onisick
Boys and girls, today's homework assignment is a thought experiment. I want you all to put yourselves in the shoes of the CXO team making a decision to move to private cloud. There is, of course, one catch: You may not factor in ROI. We're dropping ROI because it clouds the subject (bad pun intended.) Let's skip the why-should-I-do-this-experiment; I'd of course default to,"Because I told you so."
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Dell Moves Ahead Fluidly in Storage
January 20, 2012 12:32 PM
Posted by David Hill
The IT industry is always adapting to new trends, from client-server and the PC revolution of the '80s and '90s to cloud computing and big data today. These trends inspire successful new vendor entrants, but they can also be problematic for established IT vendors. Over time, some leaders don't adapt and die (see Digital Equipment Corporation), while others swoon and survive in a reduced state by being acquired by larger saviors (see Sun Microsystems).
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Are There No Fans For The FAN?
January 19, 2012 9:00 AM
Posted by Howard Marks
A few years ago, Brad O'Neill, then an analyst with the Taneja Group, coined the term FAN (file area network) to describe a virtualized file storage system. Organizations that build FANs that integrate multiple heterogeneous file stores presenting a single unified, optimized name space should be able to save a significant amount of time, effort and money. The collapse this month of AutoVirt is just another example of how this promising technology has never gained any traction with paying customers.
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Best of the Web
VXLAN termination on physical devices
VXLAN is an Experimental IETF draft of protocols to enable the creation of a large overlay, multi-tenant network.
ONF Deadly Serious About OpenFlow-Based SDNs
: OpenFlow is poised to reach over-hyped status, yet there are practical, useful reasons for keeping an eye on Openflow. The biggest cloud players are involved and driving the feature creation.
Practical Introduction to Applied OpenFlow
Get a primer on the Openflow protocol and what it can do for networking.
On Resilience of Spit-Architecture Networks
This research papers investigates the practical issues in split-architecture networks and the placement of the controllers, such as Openflow controllers, in the network.
