This article is Part 1 in series that will take a closer look at the architecture and methods of a Hadoop cluster, and how it relates to the network and server infrastructure. The content presented here is largely based on academic work and conversations I’ve had with customers running real production clusters. If you run production [...]
On data center scale, OpenFlow, and SDN
April 21, 2011 By 21 Comments
Lately I’ve been thinking about the potential applicability of OpenFlow to massively scalable data centers. A common building block of a massive cloud data center is a cluster, a grouping of racks and servers with a common profile of inter-rack bandwidth and latency characteristics. One of the primary challenges in building networks for a massive [...]
Cisco UCS Networking videos (in HD), Updated & Improved!
March 8, 2011 By 31 Comments
Emergence of the Massively Scalable Data Center
February 9, 2011 By 15 Comments
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Massively Scalable Data Centers. These are the emerging data centers built by cloud service providers that may contain tens or even hundreds of thousands of physical server machines. Throw a modest amount of server virtualization on top and you could have more than a million end nodes in [...]
Cisco UCS criticism and FUD: Answered
December 31, 2010 By 47 Comments
One of my readers recently submitted a comment asking me to respond to some criticisms he frequently hears about Cisco UCS. This is a pretty typical request I get from partners and perspective customers, and its a list of stuff I ‘ve seen many times before, so I thought it would be fun to address [...]
VMware 10GE QoS Design Deep Dive with Cisco UCS, Nexus
September 15, 2010 By 38 Comments
Last month I wrote a brief article discussing the intelligent QoS capabilities of Cisco UCS in a VMware 10GE scenario, accompanied by some flash animations for visual learners like me. In that article I (intentionally) didn’t get too specific with design details or technical nuance. Rather, I wanted to set the stage first with a [...]
Cisco UCS Networking Best Practices (in HD)
June 22, 2010 By 46 Comments
UPDATE 3/8/2011: This video series has been obsoleted by a new and updated series posted here: Cisco UCS Networking videos (in HD), Updated & Improved! This is a presentation I developed covering networking best practices for Cisco UCS, and now have recorded in High Definition for your viewing pleasure! Sweet! This presentation assumes familiarity with [...]
Setting the stage for TRILL, rethinking data center switching
May 7, 2010 By 46 Comments
As data centers become increasingly dynamic and dense with virtualization – how the classic Ethernet switching design adopts to these new models and scales becomes an important and challenging question. Virtualization and cloud based services says that any workload can exist anywhere, at anytime, on demand, and move to any location without disruption. This is [...]
Cisco UCS and Nexus 1000V design diagram with Palo adapter
August 11, 2009 By 44 Comments
This is a follow-up and enhancement of a previous design diagram in which I showed Cisco UCS running the standard VMware vSwitch. In this post I am once again showing Cisco UCS utilizing the Cisco (Palo) virtualized adapter with an implementation of VMware vSphere 4.0, however in this design we are running ESXi and the [...]
Cisco UCS and VMWare vSwitch design with Cisco 10GE Virtual Adapter
July 5, 2009 By 29 Comments
This diagram is a sample design of Cisco UCS running vSphere 4.0 utilizing the VMWare vSwitch and Cisco’s virtualization mezzanine adapter. The Cisco adapter is a dual port 10GE Converged Network Adapter supporting Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Network Interface Virtualization (NIV). The Cisco adapter is “virtual” in the sense that this single physical [...]
Top of Rack vs End of Row Data Center Designs
April 5, 2009 By 27 Comments
Nexus 1000V with FCoE CNA and VMWare ESX 4.0 deployment diagram
January 1, 2009 By 82 Comments
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