Show 38 – Comparing Data Centre Fabrics from Juniper, Brocade and Cisco

Kurt Bales has a customer who wants to buy a new Data Centre Network and the three main networking vendors (Juniper, Cisco & Brocade) have pitched at him and the customer. Kurt then contacted the Pushers and said “This would make a great podcast to talk about how it looks, works and the reality of the so-called “Data Centre Fabric networks, plus I’ve got some questions that I’d like to get some second opinions.”

So we rounded up Ivan from IOS Hints and Greg from EtherealMind to record a fast, furious and focussed look at the state of play with the three data centre fabrics today. Lots of speculation, wild guesses and deep diving followed. I learned heaps.

Topics that we covered: * data centre fabric design, TRILL, Borg or Big Brother approaches, * FCoE, iSCSI, NFS, Routing, * Juniper, QFX 3500, QFabric, ERX, ICN, * Brocade, VDX, VCS, FSPF, * Cisco, Nexus 7000, Nexus 5000,

Guests & Hosts

Ivan Pepelnjak

Kurt Bales

Greg Ferro

Links and Posts

This post is where Ivan looks into TRILL and STP interaction at the edge of the L2 network. IOSHints TRILL/FABRIC PATH – STP INTEGRATION

Here is the post where Ivan outlines the Borg / Big Brother architectures. THE DATA CENTER FABRIC ARCHITECTURES

Brad Hedlund’s post on Inverse Virtualisation – it seems Cisco might be forgetting that  there is more than one way to do it and Brad talks about the the other ways to do it while pointing out that the way HE does it is best. Keep up the good work Brad and stay “on message” for Cisco – keep pulling for the team.