Category: Data Center

Ethan Banks has a great article @ PACKETattack: in Assembly Required – Interconnecting 2 Ethernet Chassis Switches he describes various options you have when you want to connect your redundant core switches. Using more than one physical link is the obvious choice; most people are careful enough to use at least two linecards, but the true magic begins when you start considering the bandwidth allocation to individual linecards and port groups within linecards.

Greg Ferro asked a very valid question in his blog: “Why does iSCSI use TCP as the underlying transport protocol”? It’s possible to design storage-focused protocol that uses connectionless lower layers (NFS comes to mind), but the storage industry has been too focused on their past to see past the artificial obstacles they’ve set up themselves.