Brocade Virtual Symposium 2012

Part 1: What is an Ethernet Fabric?

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Part 1 of the Virtual Symposium focuses on Ethernet fabrics:

• Historical Ethernet LAN design: The 3-layer Hierarchy with Spanning Tree
• The demand for fabric technology, from Ethernet to Fibre Channel
• Core-Edge Ethernet Fabric Architecture
• The design of Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches
• Brocade’s VCS technology: Auto-healing and improved utilization
• Virtual machine-aware network automation (port profiles and vCenter)
• The Brocade VDX product family

Join Chip Copper of Brocade and the following Tech Field Day delegates as they discuss this question.

Personnel: Brandon Carroll, Chip Copper, Ethan Banks, Greg Ferro, Ivan Pepelnjak, Stephen Foskett

Part 2: Converged Networking and Storage

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Part 2 of the Virtual Symposium turns to the topic of convergence. The delegates discuss the core questions of convergence:

• What’s stopping convergence and what’s driving it?
• Who owns responsibility organizationally?
• What protocols (Fibre Channel, FCoE, iSCSI, or even NFS) “count”?
• Contrasting the financial benefits with the management complexity.
• A discussion of other protocols (especially iSCSI) over lossless-Ethernet (DCB)
• Comparison of buffer credit mechanisms (as in Fibre Channel) with pause mechanisms (in DCB Ethernet)
• Demands on Ethernet hardware design to support converged traffic (less over-subscription, larger buffers, etc)
• The heavy demands placed by solid state storage on storage networks
• The role of Ethernet fabrics in converged networks
• The challenge of ETS (802.1Qaz) and DCBX for storage vendors
• Considering the difficulty of implementing congestion notification (802.1Qau) in network hardware

Join Chip Copper of Brocade and the following Tech Field Day delegates as they discuss this question.

Personnel: Chip Copper, Josh O'Brien, Stephen Foskett, Tony Bourke

Part 3: Multi-Path vs. Multi-Chassis

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Join a panel of networking heavyweights as they discuss multi-chassis architecture such (Brocade VCS) and contrast it to multi-pathing technology (TRILL). The discussion touches on the following points:

• How TRILL fabrics do multi-path and where it really works
• What link-state routing protocol to use (Routing Bridges, IS-IS, FSPF)
• Is interoperability and standardization (Fabric Path, VCS) a red herring?
• An extensive whiteboard demonstration of load balancing across multiple links with aggregation groups – traditional Ethernet LACP/Port Channels per-flow vs. Brocade per-frame link aggregation
• Further whiteboard discussion of scalability and standards-compliance of multi-chassis technology

Personnel: Chip Copper, Chris Marget, Greg Ferro, Ivan Pepelnjak, Josh O'Brien, Tony Bourke

Part 4: Hard Cores and Soft Edges

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Ivan Pepelnjak leads a discussion of virtual machine networking and tenant isolation. The panel discusses the following issues:

• Virtual “soft switch” capability
• Cisco UCS VM-FEX and Arista EOS VM Tracer
• Brocade Automated Migration of Port Profiles (AMPP)
• Security implications of flexible network automation
• Does a virtual chassis concept address the challenges of dynamic virtual infrastructure?
• Convergence of networking and storage
• Long-distance virtual machine motion

Personnel: Chip Copper, Derick Winkworth, Greg Ferro, Ivan Pepelnjak, Tom Hollingsworth, Tony Bourke