TechOpsGuys.com Availability matters.

Moving on up to Number two

TechOps Guy: Nate

Brings a tear to me eye, my favorite switching vendor had a pretty impressive announcement today:

Extreme Networks commanded the #2 revenue position for data center Top-of-Rack switches according to the quarterly Ethernet market share report, behind only Cisco, driven by its industry leading Summit(R) X650, Summit X450 and Summit X480 switches. In the “Top of Rack” switch port shipment category, Extreme Networks increased its port shipments by 194% compared to the same quarter one year ago. This demonstrates continued momentum for the Company in the dynamic and demanding data center Ethernet market.

If you haven’t already seen the X650, X480 and even X450 Series of switches check them out. They do offer several capabilities that no other vendor on the market provides. And they are very affordable.

I have blogged on some of my more favorite topics in the past, with regards to their technology. I’ve been using Extreme stuff for just about 10 years now I think.

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I remember the 2nd switch I bought(this one for my employer), a Summit 48 with an external power supply I think it was in 2001. Bought it off Ebay from what I assume was a crashed dot com or something. Anyways they didn’t include the cable(sold “as is”) to connect the switch to the redundant power supply. So I hunted around trying to find what part to order, couldn’t find anything. So I called support.

The support tech had me recite the serial# of the unit to him, and he said they don’t have a part# for that cable, so they couldn’t sell me one. But he happened to have a few cables laying around so he put one in a fedex pouch and shipped it to me, free. I didn’t have a support contract(and didn’t get a support contract until I made a much larger purchase several years later). But I guess you could say that friendly support engagement certainly played a factor in me keeping tabs on the company and the products going forward, leading up to a million dollar purchase several years later(different company) of more than 3,000 ports.

I used my first switch, also Summit 48 as my home network switch for a good 5 years, before I decided it drew too much power for what I needed(48 port switch running on maybe 5-6 ports total), and was pretty noisy(as are pretty much all switches from that era, I think it was manufactured in ‘98).  Got a good deal on a Summit 48si, and upgraded to that! For another year, and then retired it to a shelf. It drew half the power, and after replacing all of the fans in the unit(original fans too loud) it was quieter, but my network needs shrank even more from ~5-6 systems to ~2-3 (yay VMware), and I wanted to upgrade to gigabit.

From the Summit 48 article above, I thought this is a good indication on how easy their stuff is to use, even more than 10 years ago:

[..]We tested it with and without the QoS enabled. Without the QoS enabled, I began to see glitches in the video. The video halted abruptly at rates over 98 percent. With two commands, I enabled QoS on the Summit switches. Summit48 intelligently discarded the packets with lower priority, preserving the video stream’s quality even at 100 percent utilization.

Eventually recycled my Summit 48, along with an old Cisco switch(which I never used), couple really old Foundry load balancers(never used them either) a couple of years ago. Was too lazy to try to ebay them or put them on craigslist. Still have my 48si, it’s a really nice switch I like it a lot, they still sell it in fact even today. And still release updates(ExtremeWare 7.x) for it. The Summit 48 code base(ExtremeWare 1.x-4.x) was retired probably in 2002, so nothing new released for it for a long time.

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So, congratulations Extreme for doing such a great job.

What can you accomplish in two microseconds?

TechOps Guy: Nate

An interesting post on the Datacenter Knowledge site about the growth in low latency data centers, the two things that were pretting shocking to me at the end were:

“I still find it amazing,” said McPartland. “A blink of an eye is 300 milliseconds. That’s an eternity in this business.”

How much of an eternity: “You can do a heck of a lot in 2 microseconds,” said Kaplan.

Interesting the latency requirements these fast stock traders are looking for, reminded me of a network upgrade the NYSE did deploying some Juniper stuff a while back as reported by The Register:

With the NewYork Stock Exchange down on Wall Street being about ten miles away from the data center in New Jersey, the delay between Wall Street and the systems behind the NYSE is about 105 microseconds. This is not a big deal for some trading companies, but means millions of dollars for others.

[..]

NYSE Technologies, which is the part of the company that actually hooks people into the NYSE and Euronext exchanges, has rolled out a market data system based on the Vantage 8500 switches. The system offers latencies per core switch in the range of 25 microseconds for one million messages per second on messages that are 200 bytes in size.

The Vantage 8500 switch seems pretty scalable, claiming to have non blocking scalability of 10GbE for up to 3,400 servers, announced last year.

Arista Networks somewhat recently launched an initiative aimed at this market segment as well.

Since the Juniper announcement, Force10 announced that the NYSE has chosen their gear for the next generation data centers at the NYSE, the Juniper switching gear so far hasn’t looked all that great compared to the competition, so I’d be curious how the deployment of Force10 stuff relates to the earlier deployment of Juniper stuff:

SAN JOSE, Calif., November 9, 2009 – Force10 Networks, Inc., the global technology leader that data center, service provider and enterprise customers rely on when the network is their business, today announced that the NYSE Euronext has selected its high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) core and access switches to power the management network in their next-generation data centers in the greater New Jersey and London metro areas.

Force10 of course has been one of the early innovators and leaders in 10GbE port density and raw throughput(at least on paper, I’ve never used their stuff personally though have heard good things). On a related note it wasn’t long ago that they filed for an IPO, I wish them the best, as Force10 really is an innovative company and I’ve admired their technology for several years now.

(how do I remember all of these news articles?)

Yawn..

TechOps Guy: Nate

I was just watching some of my daily morning dose of CNBC and they had all these headlines about how Cisco was going to make some earth shattering announcement(“Change the internet forever”), and then the announcement hit, some new CRS-1 router, that claimed 12x faster performance than the competition. So naturally I was curious. Robert Paisano on the floor of the NYSE was saying how amazing it was that the router could download the library of congress in 1 second(he probably didn’t understand the router would have no place to put it).

If I want a high end router that means I’m a service provider and in that case my personal preference would be for Foundry Networks (now Brocade). Juniper makes good stuff too of course though honestly I am not nearly as versed in their technology. Granted I’ll probably never work for such a company as those companies are really big and I prefer small companies.

But in any case wanted to illustrate (another) point. According to Cisco’s own site, their fastest single chassis system has a mere 4.48 terrabits of switching capacity. This is called the CRS-3, which I don’t even see listed as a product on their site, perhaps it’s yet to come. The biggest, baddest product they have on their site right now is a 16-slot CRS-1. This according to their own site, has a total switching capacity of a paltry 1.2Tbps, and even worse a per-slot capacity of 40Gbps (hello 2003).

So take a look at the Foundry Networks (the Brocade name makes me shudder, I have never liked them) , their NetIron XMR series. From their documentation the “total switching fabric”, ranges from 960 gigabits on the low end to 7.68 terrabits on the high end. Switch forwarding capacity ranges from 400 gigabits to 3.2 terrabits. This comes out to 120 gigabits of full duplex switch fabric per slot (same across all models). While I haven’t been able to determine precisely how long XMR has been on the market I have found evidence that it is at least nearly 3 years old.

To put it in another perspective, in a 48U rack with the new CRS-3 you can get 4.48 terrabits of switching fabric(1 chassis is 48U). With Foundry in the same rack you can get one XMR32k and one XMR16k(combined size 47U) for a total of 11.52 terrabits of switching fabric. More than double the fabric in the same space, from a product that is 3 years old. And as you can imagine in the world of IT, 3 years is a fairly significant amount of time.

And while I’m here and talking about Foundry and Brocade take a look at this from Brocade, it’s funny it’s like something I would write. Compares the Brocade Director switches vs Cisco (“Numbers don’t lie”). One of my favorite quotes:

To ensure accuracy, Brocade hired an independent electrician to test both the Brocade 48000 and the Cisco MDS 9513 and found that the 120 port Cisco configuration actually draws 1347 watts, 45% higher than Cisco’s claim of 931 watts. In fact, an empty 9513 draws more electrical current (5.6 amps) than a fully-populated 384 port Brocade 48000 (5.2 amps). Below is Brocade’s test data. Where are Cisco’s verified results?

Another

With 33% more bandwidth per slot (64Gb vs 48Gb), three times as much overall bandwidth (1.5Tb vs 0.5 Tb) and a third the power draw, the Brocade 48000 is a more scalable building block, regardless of the scale, functionality or lifetime of the fabric. Holistically or not, Brocade can match the “advanced functionality” that Cisco claims, all while using far less power and for a much [?? I think whoever wrote it was in a hurry]

That’s just too funny.