While some whole heartedly believe in not connecting sites with ANY type of layer 2, and I actually am a bigger believer in that now than I used to be, customers still ask and “require” this occasionally – namely for workload mobility. Any answer I get or anything I read does not actively promote using an overlay such as VXLAN between data centers. The responses are usually around 1. BUM traffic control 2. ARP localization 3. Traffic Trombone (since only one active default gateway) 4. STP isolation. If you want to know all of the typical responses, look at the benefits of OTV. But again, in a world that will soon be eaten by software, why can’t a viable solution be developed for L2 DCI with overlays?
Who will be the first to promote it? Will it be via hardware or simply an application of network virtualization? Because it will happen.
While some whole heartedly believe in not connecting sites with ANY type of layer 2, and I actually am a bigger believer in that now than I used to be, customers still ask and “require” this occasionally – namely for workload mobility. Any answer I get or anything I read does not actively promote using an overlay such as VXLAN between data centers. The responses are usually around 1. BUM traffic control 2. ARP localization 3. Traffic Trombone (since only one active default gateway) 4. STP isolation. If you want to know all of the typical responses, look at the benefits of OTV. But again, in a world that will soon be eaten by software, why can’t a viable solution be developed for L2 DCI with overlays?
0 Comments
Let me be fair by saying I work on designs on a regular basis that are 99% Cisco. Of course, there are integrations with other equipment for every technology, but from an R/S standpoint, it’s mainly Cisco. Occasionally, I’ll come across competitive (to CSCO) information, but that’s about it. For this post, I wanted to make it a point to see what was out there in the new 40 GbE LAN switching market. It’s a topic that is becoming more popular (for various trends in the Data Center) and I’m really quite surprised about it all, so I figured let’s dive in and see who’s got what.
And this was a shallow dive. The goal was not to spend countless hours on each solution; I simply wanted to get a high level overview. The focus was just to try and get the following questions answered. Who has fixed configuration switches with 40GbE interfaces? Do they support “standard” L2/L3 protocols? Do they support some type of Layer 2 multipathing? Is there support for a type of MLAG? What is the port to port latency? What is the power consumption? Is there anything “special” about the switch, or is it unique in anyway? After a few seconds of thinking about it, I decided to focus on Arista, Dell Force10, Extreme, IBM, Juniper, Brocade, HP, and of course, Cisco. |
AuthorJason Edelman, Founder & CTO of Network to Code. Categories
All
Archives
May 2015
|