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Fsck It, We’ll Do It All With SSDs!
At Tech Field Day 8, we saw presentations from two vendors that had an all-flash SAN offering, taking on a storage problem that’s been brewing in data centers for a while now, and the skewed...
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The Problem
One recurring theme from virtually every one of the Network Field Day 2 vendor presentations last week (as well as the OpenFlow symposium) was affectionately referred to as “The Problem”. It was a...
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I, For One, Welcome Our New OpenFlow Overlords
When I first signed up for Networking Field Day 2 (The Electric Boogaloo), I really had no idea what OpenFlow was. I’d read a few articles, listened to a few podcasts, but still only had a vague idea...
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Creating Your Own SSL Certificate Authority (and Dumping Self Signed Certs)
SSL (or TLS if you want to be super totally correct) gives us many things (despite many of the recent shortcomings). Privacy (stop looking at my password) Integrity (data has not been altered in...
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The VDI Delusion Book Review
Sitting on a beach in Aruba (sorry, I had to rub that one in), I finished Madden & Company’s take on VDI: The VDI Delusion. The book is from the folks at brianmadden.com, a great resource for all...
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TRILLapalooza
If there’s one thing people lament in the routing and switching world, it’s the spanning tree protocol and the way Ethernet forwarding is done (or more specifically, it’s limitations). I’ve made my own...
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Is The OS Relevant Anymore?
I started out my career as a condescending Unix administrator, and while I’m not a Unix administrator anymore, I’m still quite condescending. In the past, I’ve run data centers based on Linux, FreeBSD,...
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VMware Getting Rid of vRAM Licensing (vTax)?
(Update 8/21/12: VMware has a comment on the rumors [they say check next week]) A colleague pointed me to this article, which apparently indicates that with vSphere 5.1 VMware is getting rid of vRAM...
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VMware Year-Long vTax Disaster is Gone!
The rumors were true, vTax is gone. The announcement, rumored last week, was confirmed today. Tequila! Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out. And perusing their pricing white paper you...
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Requiem for the ACE
Ah, the Cisco ACE. As we mourn our fallen product, I’ll take a moment to reflect on this development as well as what the future holds for Cisco and load balancing/ADC. First off, let me state I have no...
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Link Aggregation Confusion
In a previous article, I discussed the somewhat pedantic question: “What’s the difference between EtherChannel and port channel?” The answer, as it turns out, is none. EtherChannel is mostly an IOS...
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Death To vMotion
There are very few technologies in that data center that have had as significant of an impact of VMware’s vMotion. It allowed us to de-couple operating system and server operations. We could maintain,...
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Hey, Remember vTax?
Hey, remember vTax/vRAM? It’s dead and gone, but with 6 Terabyte of RAM servers now available, imagine what could have been (your insanely high licensing costs). Set the wayback machine to 2011, when...
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Peak Fibre Channel
There have been several articles talking about the death of Fibre Channel. This isn’t one of them. However, it is an article about “peak Fibre Channel”. I think, as a technology, Fibre Channel is in...
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