Data Center & Virtualization

Overlay Transport Virtualization is the technology that you may encounter, if you are going to span your Data Center across different geographical location with full retaining of layer 2 information. It literally enables you connectivity between 2 servers within the same Vlan that are placed far away of each other.   

The other way of providing Data Center Interconnectivity besides OTV is VxLAN. VxLAN has ben developed through a few years and despite at the beginning was considered as a solution that enabled spanning VLANs across the single Data Center, nowadays is considered as a solution equal or even better to compare with OTV and enables…

In the course of time the old-fashioned model od Data Center became inefficient especially when requirements regarding the traffic from North-South (client-server) have changed itself to East-West (server-server) and demanding applications started to be “hungry” for more than Gigabit links bundled via Portchannel. Also the better redundancy with non blocking links has started to be…

Multiple Context on ASA provides the highest level of virtualization, within one single chassis we get 2 virtual firewalls. Each with separate Data and Control Plane. Idea similar to VRF but in Multiple Context we may share one interface between 2 contexts what makes its more sophisticated.

Spanning Tree Protocol is not a good idea especially if we take into consideration data center. Wasting of bandwith by blocking links in environement which demands the highest throughput, is not desirable. Virtual Port Channel feature sorts it out in simple and clever way.

Vmware vSphere offers two amazing solutions in regard to ensuring high availability. One of them is called High Availability and the second one Fault Tolerance feature. Both of them complement each other providing uninterrupted working of the virtual machines in cluster.

NX-OS that we may come across on Cisco Nexus switches provide very interesting feature which is called FabricPath. FabricPath has evolved from TRILL,  consists in “layer 2 routing” and definitely is one od the most important feature in modern datacenter.

Data access method determines which way data exchange between compute system (host) and storage will be going through. There are 3 ways, completely different, with utilization of different mechanism and protocols. File, Block and Object level Storage access characterizes with different speed, reliability and efficiency. Moreover, they require completely different appliances, but sometimes they can be  “merged”…

Both features mentioned in the title, play a special role and are very important when data center grows up, when new switches, hosts and virtual machines are needed. They allow us to expand SAN infrastructure (fabric) and not spend additional money by the way.

Backup is the keyword in case of data storage. Even the newest technologies deployed will not work out if one day turns out that some hard drives with crucial data don’t work, RAID may failed owing to the numbers of broken hard disks, your SAN has been destroyed or data have been accidentally (or not) permamently…

In the perfect world storage systems consists of SSD flash drives with a lot quantity of RAM memory which works as a cache. Then you don’t have to worry about read/write latencies (unless the network part is a bottleneck). It is a perfect world, usually modern storage system consists of mixed SSD  and SAS (serial attached SCSI) disks…

Nowadays companies go away of keeping entire IT infrastructure “on the spot”. It has many advantages like reduction of costs by hiring less IT engineers or buying less needed IT stuff (switches, routers servers etc) and no worries about IT problems hardware or software. In this article I’m going to look closer the Clouds from the end…

Provider that delivers any Cloud solutions is responsible for maintaining whole hardware infrastructure and depends on type of deployed service solutions for software also. This article will be devoted to Cloud models offered by Providers and which one of them is suitable for particular companies.

Even very well implemented servers farm within VMware vSphere will be working in limited scale and inefficiently if the network part won’t be deployed correctly. VMware in regard to networking provides many features, which are good to know and solutions like virtual Standard Switch and Distributed Switch. How to implement properly networking part, what are virtual switches,…

There is a lot of terminology in Fibre Channel and FCoE regarding ports names. What is the difference between N Port and VN Port ? What was FC- AL, and how data are exchanged in fibre channel infrastructure ? What are 5 layers of Fibre Channel ? How does it look in FCoE ? Let’s break…

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