Inside Enterprise IT : Networking

Dell Extends its Networking Portfolio With Juniper Networks

Dell-Jennifer G — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:50:00 GMT

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of planning going on around Dell lately. We’ve come to you before and talked about our upcoming Virtual-Ready Infrastructure (VRI) and how the Scalent relationship fits into that. However, we haven’t yet given you a ton of details on the networking piece. Yeah, ok – we told you how we’re expanding our Brocade partnership, but there’s even more.

We’re now adding Juniper to round out the end-to-end 10GbE story. Both the new Brocade and Juniper networking products will become part of our existing PowerConnect brand and will extend that brand into areas like WAN, security and data-center Ethernet switching.

The Dell team has worked hard to bring choice to our customers. This announcement is more proof of that.

Dig into the video below where Larry Hart talks more details on the Juniper partnership, how it will play with our other products, and what it means for our relationship with Cisco.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Imprisonment or Independence in the Data Center … Your Choice

Dell-Jennifer G — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:50:00 GMT

I never feel like I get enough sleep … fighting to get six to seven solid hours in every night. However, my stresses are NOTHING compared to the noise and pressure IT admins, CIOs and CTOs deal with. Just look at our industry. From what I’ve read and learned so far, it seems Cisco and HP want customers to rip out their current hardware, software and solutions, and start “fresh” with their Unified Computing System (UCS) and BladeSystem Matrix offerings. Correct me if I’m wrong about that, but I still have to ask -- what’s their motivation? Think about it, why would they insist on something so disruptive especially in a time when customers are fighting to thrive with restricted budgets?

The bottom line in my opinion is this: locking your company into an infrastructure means a locked-in revenue stream for the provider and lack of choice and flexibility for you.

This is incredibly frustrating. It shouldn’t be novel to do the right thing for customer FIRST and make money second. Folks are dealing with legacy hardware and limited budgets (in most cases) with an intense desire to virtualize and do something called “the cloud,” whatever that means to them. That’s enough to digest without having to consider that everything they’ve done up to this point might have been a waste of time and money.

Dell thinks there’s another way, a way where you don’t have to eat your own young to thrive and stay competitive.

First, we’re open. We’ve figured out how to get you where you’re going, specifically with virtualization, using most of what you’ve already invested in.

Second, we’re pragmatic. (pause for smirk on overused marketing word) We give you answers to IT problems now, today, just in case you don’t feel like waiting on promises that no one has proven or deployed.

Finally, we’re end-to-end. We already offer first class products at each step of the fully virtualized solution, including servers, storage, networking, desktop and the cloud, instead of specializing in only one part of the data center and trying our hand at new businesses.

This week at VMworld, we announced two new partnerships that strengthen our open, pragmatic and end-to-end approach. Brocade expands its 10-year relationship with the Dell family to provide enhanced leadership of next-generation data center networking with 10/40/100GbE, Security, iSCSI, FCoE and Converged Enhanced DCB Ethernet. These are in addition to our Brocade FC switches.

But we’re covering more than just the networking side of investment protection. We’re also partnering with Scalent Systems to make heterogeneous, virtualized environments portable for easier disaster recovery and higher availability. Now, you’ll no longer have to redefine your physical storage and network connections each time you need to move whole hypervisors, physical applications, workloads or virtual machines (VM). All of this can be done NOW with your existing technologies and future flexibility to purchase and use what you need to customize your infrastructure.

This is just the beginning. Folks like The Register, eWeek and ChannelWeb are already talking, and we’ll hit the streets a few times this fall with more info. In the meantime, ask some hard questions. The next time you find yourself sitting in the big, leather chair being entertained by the “latest and greatest” buzz solution, make sure it doesn’t end up stinging you.

Dell Boosts Options for Virtualization – Adds 10GbE and Automatic VM Discovery on CX4

DELL-Greg W — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:58:00 GMT

Virtualization has become a fully mainstream idea, talked about in circles from the IT admin all the way up to the CEO’s office, but there are still a lot of people out there that I talk to that just have their toes in the water, or are waiting to start or to expand their virtualization efforts.

If you aren’t fully tuned into this concept, virtualization can provide many benefits to organizations for increasing availability, enhancing disaster recovery, reducing costs around equipment and management, and more. A key component to getting the most out of virtual server deployments is utilizing shared storage like a storage area network or SAN.

Just like consolidating your servers, consolidating your storage on a SAN can help enable better availability and data protection as well as helping reduce management costs. We have made it one of our goals to simplify and accelerate your virtualization deployments by providing information, products and services to help our customers understand, scope, deploy and get the most out of their virtualization efforts.

We’re doing it again today by announcing enhancements to our CX4 storage arrays and networking products, like a high port count 1GbE blade switch, a 10GbE blade pass through I/O module, a 10GbE blade mezzanine card and 1GbE quad port blade mezzanine cards, and services that better enable consolidation and virtualization.

Our Dell/EMC CX4 storage arrays now support 10Gbit iSCSI (10GbE), along with the already supported 1Gbit iSCSI, 4Gbit Fibre Channel, and 8Gbit Fibre Channel, all on one array. The additional bandwidth from 10GbE can enable support for more virtual machines and reduce the number of connections needed from server to storage. The CX4 has also been enhanced with Virtualization Aware Navisphere, a feature that simplifies storage in virtual environments through automatic discovery of virtual machines and VMware ESX servers, end-to-end virtual-to-physical machine mapping, and advanced search for instant virtual machine discovery.

All this is happening at a great time as we are getting geared up for vmworld next week in San Francisco. You can check out my upcoming booth theatre presentation on the new CX4 capabilities by clicking here.

We hope that if you are there, you’ll participate in some of the many things we have planned to help better inform and educate you on virtualization options.

If you’re not, you can follow @Dellatvmworld on Twitter or check out Dell’s Virtual Tradeshow Booth. Also tune in for Andrew Gilman’s blog this week on all the things we’ll be doing at the show, including live technical demonstrations and in-booth white boarding sessions with our experts that can help you take the next step to improve and simplify your IT.

Cisco Blade Server Misses the Mark

DELL-Rick Be — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Virtualization is undoubtedly a hot topic in the industry, especially today. After much anticipation, Cisco finally announced its “Project California.” As expected, Cisco launched its Unified Computing System (UCS), a blade server appliance designed for virtualization.

There has been a lot of discussion about what this means for Cisco’s partners in the virtualization server market. Are we partners? Are we competitors? Yes and yes. Dell continues to have a strategic networking partnership with Cisco to provide comprehensive solutions to our customers – today’s news does not change this. Am I worried that Cisco’s new appliance will take away business from Dell? Not at all.

We’ve seen this before. Companies bring to market solutions that address a narrow population of customers or a single IT issue. While Cisco is a leader in the networking space, the server market is a very different ball game. CIOs aren’t looking for proprietary, appliance-like products like UCS because they drive up TCO and create more complexity. This is where Cisco has missed the mark.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the excitement about virtualization that Cisco’s news has generated is great. This is a technology that has revolutionized business computing and I am particularly passionate about it. It seems, however, that Cisco is a bit confused about what customers want and need from virtualization solutions.

When I am talking with customers, there are common themes that come up about what businesses want:

Options and open standards – Flexibility is key to long term survival in today’s economy and this is what Dell delivers better than anyone else. Companies need more from a supplier than specialized, high-priced solutions. Businesses are looking for the whole package – a technology partner that can help them address and manage their large data sets, edge of the network workloads and everything else.
Better total cost of ownership – Customers expect that innovation in IT will be focused on lowering the cost of operations WITHOUT significantly raising the price for the hardware.
Simple management – Customers need the ability to manage their hardware locally. This is not possible with HP’s Virtual Connect –unless you have a 100% HP data center. And it does not appear to be possible with Cisco blades.

Dell’s strategy to simplify IT resonates with CIOs because it helps their organizations reclaim the most valued business resources: people, time and money. You will see exciting news from Dell in the coming months. Soon, we will introduce our totally redesigned Nehalem-based 11^th Generation PowerEdge virtualization servers. And you will also see us expand out partnerships to offer even more options for business looking to build open, flexible and powerful virtualized environments. Stay tuned.

Blade Server Myth #1 – Cost

DELL-Kara K — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

One of the primary ways to simplify IT infrastructure – and save in the process – is through server consolidation. Blade technology is a good way to approach this, but many IT managers are reluctant to take the blade route. There are several myths about blades that create the impression that blades aren’t the best choice for consolidation. In a recent E-Guide on Blade Server Trends sponsored by Dell and Intel, virtualization expert Barb Goldworm attacked these myths.

Her comments are worth reading:

Because blade systems require an up-front purchase of a blade chassis, one misconception is that blades are a more expensive solution than rack servers. In fact, if you are only implementing one or two servers in a single location, this is true. However, if you are implementing four, five or more servers, the total cost per server can actually be lower, because of the shared components within the blade chassis. Just calculating the numbers on hardware alone (without counting other savings such as power, cabling, and management), the costs for a blade server can be lower than a comparable rack server.

One blade customer did a very basic comparison using Dell blades, calculating the cost per server based on the blade cost plus 1/10 of the chassis cost. He estimates the blades saved him 20% over comparable rack servers. While these numbers vary by vendor and configuration, the bottom line is that unless the chassis is mostly empty, blades cost less.

Stay tuned to the blog next week for myth #2.

Simplify your IT and Save

DELL-Kara K — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Yesterday you heard from Kris Fitzgerald on the importance of reducing IT complexity and prioritization. Here are a few more posts from our Inside IT blog that also talk about simplifying IT saving time and money.

Simplify IT - A customer perspective

IT Change - SaaS and cloud-computing solutions

Virtual Connect overshot the need and created the opportunity for FlexAddress

marc_farley — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:36:00 GMT

Dell's FlexAddress announcement on Tuesday drew this response by Gary Thome of HP. So what's a poor system admin to do if they want to manage SAN and LAN addresses for their blade systems? I'd suggest they let their accountants make the decision for them.

Here's the deal. HP apparently had this elegant old technology from Tandem that used specialized switches to map network IDs to hot-swappable compute modules. They re-introduced this technology as Virtual Connect for their blade servers because they figured it solved the problem of maintaining consistent network IDs when swapping out compute blades. In fact, Virtual Connect works pretty well - all you need to do is buy fault-tolerant pairs of specialized chassis-insertable switches to provide the ID mappings. That doesn't really force customers to change their network infrastructures, as some would suggest, but it does add a lot of cost to the blade solution.

Over the years Dell has been criticized for copying the technologies created by other companies. Brad Anderson, Dell's Senior VP of Business Products said as much last November after Dell announced its acquisition of EqualLogic:

“It’s fair historically, if you go back a year or so, that you would have thought of Dell as more of a fast follower,” said Brad Anderson, senior vice president of Dell’s business product group. “But we recognize that if we want to solve our customers’ problems and provide leadership, we’re going to need to jump in very early.” “With Michael coming back, things are a little bit different,” Anderson, said. “Company-wide, we are driving IT simplification very hard. It is our strategy; it is our mission. It’s also driving a cultural change within Dell.”

In other words, when we see a good idea now, we don't just try to imitate it, but try to figure out how to make it as simple to use and efficient as possible. And that's what FlexAddress is all about. HP had done a pretty good job providing a solution, but it was originally designed for mainframe environments and not today's X86-based blade servers. As a result, Virtual Connect is over-engineered and expensive - there is no need for the specialized switches it uses.

Dell engineers figured out a much simpler way to provide persistent network IDs for blades as they are swapped or upgraded. The network IDs for each blade are mapped to another set of network IDs in the chassis according to slot the blade is inserted into. In other words, when a blade is removed and another blade is inserted in the same slot, it automatically is mapped to the same chassis-based network IDs - which means all LAN and SAN network functions work exactly the same as before. That includes VLANs and zoning and anything else you can think of. HP would have you think that all this has to be redone with FlexAddress, but it doesn't.

Maybe there are a few corner case advantages for Virtual Connect, such as lab environments where changes to blade configurations are more random and have less serious consequences. But in production environments where the rule of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" applies, the types of changes made to blade modules tends to be one to one replacements and upgrades. FlexAddress is perfect for this.

And one other thing. HP says that Virtual Connect was designed to enable the system admin to function independently of the network and SAN people. Oh really? And how are the proper tie-ins made from the Virtual Connect switching modules to the LAN and SAN switches anyway - by divination? C'mon guys - there is no free lunch.

So let's see now.... should I buy one SD card or a pair of expensive switches that cost approximately 10X as much? Hmmmm.....

FlexAddress - Simplifying, Reducing Cost of Blade Management

david_graves — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:15:00 GMT

Here's a post on new blade technology from Chad Fenner in our sever group....Take it away Chad...

Having launched the M-Series blades earlier this year, today we’ve introduced Flex Address which is designed as a low cost way to simplify blade server changes - servicing, upgrading or replacing a blade.

What makes this very different from other blade vendors – is that you don’t have to switch your switch. Unlike some similar implementations from competitors, FlexAddress works with any switch, such as Cisco and Brocade, as well as with any pass through module.

It works by locking a server's World Wide Name (WWN for Fibre Channel Fabrics) and Media Access Control (MAC for Ethernet Fabrics) to a blade slot instead of on the blade itself.

Normally if a server is removed, it loses its storage and ethernet connections, which then have to be re-mapped. That's like being forced to change your phone number because you lost your phone. Point being is that it takes time and effort to get done.

FlexAddress virtualizes the connection, so if a blade is replaced or upgraded it still maintains the exact same connection. Imagine a boot from SAN implementation – one server could be removed and another inserted and nothing else would need to be done to connect to the same storage LUN!

Pretty much all network administrators I talk to have been thrilled about this. It saves them time and money. The great thing about Dell's implementation is also how simple it is to implement. All a customer has to do is choose via a single click if they want FlexAddress active in the management software. It's implemented as an SD card on the Chassis Management Controller (CMC).

NerdBlog, eWeek, and Network World have weighed in…

I thought a cluster of tigers was called a “streak”?

david_graves — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:13:00 GMT

When it comes to clusters, it makes sense that we’d have a few announcements – uh - clustered. And I’m not sorry about the pun. We recently showed the Purdue University team installing its new high-performance computing cluster (HPCC) in just half a day.

Today, it’s all about Clemson University using a next-generation HPCC to enable a wide range of academic research, from how family migration patterns impact schools and children’s development to the design of wireless communication networks.

Known as the Palmetto Cluster, it is housed at Clemson’s Information Technology Center and comprises 512 Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers. Currently benchmarked at 31 teraflops (TF), which means it can perform more than 31 trillion operations in one second, it is expected to grow to 100 TF.

Innovative and cost-effective solutions like the Palmetto Cluster are contributing to Clemson’s steady climb in the competitive U.S. News and World Report rankings for top schools.

John Mullen, our VP of higher education, recently had the opportunity to visit Clemson and meet with three of the school’s IT leaders: Jim Bottum, CIO and vice provost for Computing and Information Technology; Jim Pepin, CTO; and Jill Gemmill, the executive director of Cyberinfrastructure Technology Integration. Here's a video of them talking about the cluster and other IT projects underway at Clemson.

View Video
Format: flv
Duration: 5:15

Go Tigers! And FWIW – as an avid golfer myself – best of luck to Clemson sophomore Kyle Stanley who shot six-under-par in a 36-hole qualifier in Columbus, OH on Monday to make it into the field for the 2008 United States Open (June 12-15 at Torrey Pines).

Configuring Flow Control on a Cisco 3750 or 2970 Switch

marc_farley — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 19:12:00 GMT

Flow control is an important network function for iSCSI SANs. I had a question come up on it at my Storage@work site in a comment and I thought I'd put the same information out here in this blog entry:

If you have a sample configuration for the iSCSI and Cisco Switch configuration, that would be very helpful.

There is a document on our web site listed on this page (under the category of network switching). You can download after registering.

http://www.equallogic.com/resources/technicaldocumentsview.aspx?id=364

There's a lot of stuff in the doc, but the section on flow control has this:

The following commands shows how to configure Gigabit Ethernet interface 0/1 on switch 1 to
auto-negotiate the correct Flow Control setting with the device to which it is connected:

Switch> enable
Switch# configure terminal
Switch(config)# interface gigabitethernet1/0/1
Switch(config-if)# flowcontrol receive desired
Switch(config-if)# exit
Switch(config)# exit
Switch# copy running-config startup-config

To view or confirm Flow Control status on a port, use the following command:

Switch# show flowcontrol interface gigabitethernet1/0/1