In our journey toward two-switch data center we covered:

• The overall idea;
• The need for high-density server virtualization (most of the times).

It’s time for the next step: get rid of legacy technologies like six 1GE interfaces per server or two FC interface cards in every server.

Need more details? Watch the Designing Private Cloud Infrastructure webinar. How about an interactive discussion? Register for the Building Next-Generation Data Center course.

Network Computing recently published an article with a promising title “Network Disaggregation: Opening the Last Back Box” and a subtitle I could totally relate to: “switch ASICs must be opened up to provide real networking flexibility.”

Occasionally I get feedback that makes me say “it’s worth doing the webinars ;)”. Here’s one I got after the layer-2 session of Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Designs webinar:

I work at a higher level of the stack, so it was a real eye opener especially with so much opinionated "myths" on the web that haven't been critically challenged such as [the usefulness of] STP.

There’s more feedback on this web page where you can also buy the webinar recording (or register for the next session of the webinar once they are scheduled).

One of my readers left a comment on my “optimize your data center by virtualizing the servers” blog post saying (approximately):

Seems like LinkedIn did it without virtualization :) Can enterprises achieve this to some extent?

Assuming you want to replace physical servers with one or two CPU cores and 4GB of memory with modern servers having dozens of cores and hundreds of GB of memory the short answer is: not for a long time.

The Model-driven Networking seems to be another buzzword riding on top of the SDN wave. What exactly is it, how is it supposed to work, will it be really vendor-independent, and has anyone implemented it? I tried to get some answers to these questions from Jeff Tantsura, chair of IETF Routing Area Working Group, in Episode 55 of Software Gone Wild.

One of my ExpertExpress engagements focused on networking in a future private cloud that might be built using OpenStack. The customer planned to deploy multiple data centers, and I recommended that they do everything they can to make sure they don’t make them a single failure domain.

Next step: translate that requirement into OpenStack terms.

A Technology Market Builder (in his own words) from a major networking vendor decided to publish a thought leadership article (in my sarcastic words) describing how Cisco’s embrace of complexity harmed the whole networking industry.

Let’s see how black this kettle-blaming pot really is ;), and make sure to have fun reading the comments to the original article.

Gabi Gerber (with a bit of help from my side) is organizing another set of SDN events in Zurich (Switzerland) in early June.

In the morning of June 7th we’ll talk about software-defined security:

An engineer working for a large system integrator sent me this question:

Since you are running a detailed series on leaf-and-spine fabrics these days, could you please suggest if following design scenarios of Facebook and Linkedin Data centers are also covered?

Short answer: No.

The moment an IETF working group agrees on a protocol someone starts creating extensions. PCEP is no exception; in the last part of the BGP-LS and PCEP webinar Julian Lucek talked about some of them.