Top of Rack - higher speed, higher density

How energy dense do you want to make your rack.

Arista announces two new switches that certainly fit high density, high speed ToR models.

Loaded with QSFP100 and backward compatible all the way to....10Gbps.

100GbE, 40GbE, 4x10GbE, 4x25GbE or 2x 50GbE

New Arista Switches

The thing I find really interesting, because we all know port densities and bandwidth is guaranteed to grow anyway... but,

7W / port

Evidently Arista believes that electrical consumption is a sunk cost in servicing the workload....

So do I.

This really drives the concept of the "logical rack" the number of racks that can be covered by a pair of ToR switches in the Spine and Leaf architectural model.

Let's conduct a short breakdown on the 32 port unit.

~ 28 100GbE connections for hosts (so, 28 hosts in ~ 2 racks at 2U size)

~28 40GbE connections for hosts ( 28 hosts in ~ 2 racks at 2U size)

~112 10GbE or 25GbE connections for hosts  (112 hosts in ~ 7 racks at 2U size)

~56 50GbE connections for hosts  (56 hosts in ~ 4 racks at 2U size)

using a pair of ports for 100GbE uplink and a pair of ports for inner-Leaf connections (not including options with the SFP+ ports)

Makes for some very well connected hosts and at ~18kW / rack, some fairly dense commodity computing....

Hybrid Cloud, how it can look....

Hybrid Cloud Network Model

The control plane is separated from the data plane.

The capability is completely API driven.

Imagine now an environment that is fully automated and orchestrated.  

It has QoS for the Enterprise Application.

It has Bandwidth Management for financial management

It has the possibility to connect at Layer 2, extending an application back to the Private Cloud

It has SLA

It has well understood Latency

It avoids the Internet completely

Want to know more?  Follow the Twitter hashtag #harnessthecloud

Hybrid Cloud, how it used to look....

Islands of automation areas in Cloud connectivity

And I'm not joking about owning every possible problem on the internet.

If you would like to see how it can be done now, please follow this link:

http://www.vdatacloud.com/blogs/2015/09/23/the-network-is-the-computer/

Goats and superChickens

Oddly enough, both of these are IT discussions.

The first one is how to disrupt enough to change the current status quo for Devops to work without breaking the things that work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LcQUAMS4XQ

The second is how to build teams that work.

http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_why_it_s_time_to_forget_the_pecking_order_at_work?language=en 

....

In summary:

 -- successful IT needs to have goats (first story) for continuous integration
 -- successful IT needs to have chickens (second story) to have successful teams.

The moral of the story:

Goats are versatile and useful (and cute)

AND superChickens aren't all that good for a team

Oddly enough, goats and chickens get along with each other.

Amazon Web Services in Plain English

https://www.expeditedssl.com/aws-in-plain-english


Funny and ... useful

VMworld 2015 Favorite Quote

Not much more to say about that.