The “one truck network” gets ready to roll into Interop Fall 2011
By Tim Swiader, Senior Program Manager, HP Technology Consulting
More with less. Hmmm. Like the "one truck network.” (See my blog from last week.)
How is it possible to deliver all the features PLUS functionality with high availability AND transport that infrastructure, rack mounted, in one truck? WHAT??? Oh oh...it’s manageable from the cloud! Forget about it!
The how is HP’s (part of the InteropNet network) ability to provide products that “flatten” both physical and logical layers. Purpose built? Oh yea!! Purpose designed? No question! FlexNetworking? Ba da bing!
Intelligent Resilient Framework key to Interop Fall 2011 network
A big part of the “how” is technology called Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF). I was reading HP WW Technical Marketing Engineer Jeff Kabel’s blog about IRF: Intelligent Resilient Framework rocks: boosting vMotion performance across the network
I was shocked at some of the failover times Jeff revealed in his blog. Simplified design, grouping switches into a logical unit and manageability was keys to why my team implemented IRF. Jeff’s findings are just crazy!!
During Hot Stage for InteropNet, we pulled cards out of the core switches as well as pulled power on the racks. At one point, there were no more blinking lights and it was unnervingly quiet (Glenn Evans, lead network architect with show sponsor UBM, is and rightfully so, notorious for walking up to a rack and pulling the power. Ever have a UPS croak?). Plain and simple, IRF does an amazing job at keeping the data flowing where it can. No way could we have done the timing tests Jeff talks about. It is so good to know that IRF is really…REALLY FAST!!! Seriously…check Jeff’s blog!
What does this mean to InteropNet?
So much to go into but in a shell (beyond what I mentioned above) non-blocking, loop-free connectivity. Failovers that are orders of magnitude faster than what spanning tree can do.
In the virtualized world we live in, lost time is just that…gone forever. Does time care about geography? No. And if you are within 70 kilometers from another HP A series switch, neither does IRF! Want to have nine switches IRF’d together? No problem. Leverage IRF with link aggregation (LACP) and watch as your “on-demand” performance jumps. You finally get to use all that bandwidth you are paying for.
Ba da boom!
Does all this sound too good to be true? There is no smoke and mirrors. No distracting shinny objects or look-over-there tactics. We did all of this at Interop Las Vegas too.
I will leave you with this as the countdown to Interop Fall 2011 continues:
“The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.”
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