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You are here: Home / Appearances / Brocade Virtual Symposium 2012

Brocade Virtual Symposium 2012



Brocade Virtual Symposium 2012

This Presentation date is May 2, 2012 at 13:00-15:00.


Presenters: Chip Copper, Greg Ferro, Stephen Foskett




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


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