The Next Generation Data Centre Network

The data centre is heading into an era of “fabrics.” When most IT professionals hear about “fabrics” they either think of proprietary technologies, like QFabric, or perhaps of Fibre channel which is a storage technology. Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade have really taken to the term “fabric.” While there are certainly some new developments here – TRILL (transparent interconnection of lots of links) and DCB (data centre bridging) among them – what a fabric really means is a flatter Ethernet network, with greater link resiliency. A fabric network makes building a private cloud easier because it’s built for east-west traffic flows that are caused by virtual machines moving from physical server to physical server in search of more/less resources, depending on the automation and orchestration configuration of your private cloud.

So instead of thinking about “fabric,” really you can picture a flatter network – two tiers instead of three – that don’t rely on STP, where routing is technically being done a Layer 2, and routing can be based on location-independent L2 MAC addresses.

I recently attended a vendor-agnostic session called “Ethernet Fabrics 101″ put on by Brocade in Toronto. It was really refreshing to see a vendor present basic facts about new technology with barely any vendor spin on it. Kudos to Brocade for that, and I’m looking forward to attending their next session.

Anyway, Brocade broke its definition for an Ethernet fabric into five characteristics:

Flatter Architecture
Distributed Intelligence
Scalability
Efficient
Simplified Management

I’m going to spend the next few blog entries exploring those things, as well as TRILL, DCB, and where data centre networks are headed. 2012 is a pivotal year, but I suspect things will really take off in 2013 and 2014 as prices for 40GbE comes down, and even 100GbE for really demanding data centres (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and any cloud IaaS providers).

London Rooftops – Let’s Use Them!

Photo taken by Dawn Lyons, LinesByLyons.com

The city of London has a lot of empty rooftops, especially in the downtown core. Lots of flat rooftops that just sit there, all day, all night, absorbing heat/cold and getting brown. See the picture to the right from my friend Dawn Lyons as an example – it was taken from One London Place this past June.

So much real estate. So much wasted real estate. What could it all be used for?

Solar panels, generating additional income for the owners of those buildings
Green roofs, saving money on cooling and heating those buildings
Growing food

Wait, what?! Yes, growing food! There’s a new company, called Brightfarms, in New York City that’s doing exactly that – building greenhouses on building rooftops, planting the food, and then harvesting it. They’ve also got the grocery stores they’re selling to signed to 10 year contracts to buy whatever Brightfarms grows, ensuring a steady stream of revenue similar to the way the Province of Ontario has spurred the renewable energy market with the FIT and microFIT programs.

I see this as a way to get locally grown food for the other 5 or 6 months of the year that we really can’t grow much in Ontario. I love stopping at local farmers in Middlesex County and buying corn, cucumbers, asparagus, etc. during the summer months. But what do I do in February? Buy the stuff that’s imported from Chile or California at the Superstore, just like most other people.

That sucks, doesn’t it?

I’d really like to see a local startup, or even an established farmer with some capital, take this on. There’s clearly lots of real estate available, and Brightfarms seems to think they can grow up to 227,000 kg (500,000 lbs) a year on a single rooftop using 90% less water, and 95% less space than traditional agriculture thanks to hydroponic growing methods.

So, who’s the got money? The desire? I don’t have the money, but I certainly have the desire to see this happen in London, Toronto, Montreal, Windsor, Vancouver… wherever! The space is there – we just need to use it in better, smarter ways.

vNetworks – VLANs Without Borders

Virtual local area networks (VLANs) were invented over 20 years ago, and so far VLANs have given IT a significant capability in segmenting networks and traffic, letting networks run faster and more efficiently. However, the advent of cloud computing, both public and private, along with cloud bursting, has broken the traditional network and made network management far more complex. What’s needed in the enterprise now is a platform-agnostic VLAN that can span across geographic and logical limits to rein in the infrastructure your workloads are running on. Here I’m going to focus on emerging network virtualization solutions that promise to give you, the network professional, a unified view of your network and servers.

Where Has My Server Gone?

VLANs were first introduced to the networking world in 1988. They have a come a long way since then, with major revisions as recently as 2007. VLANs are not a perfect solution though, as you cannot extend them beyond the private, corporate network. They are limited to physically connected networks, making them unsuitable for today’s shifting IT environment.

Cloud computing has broken the traditional network boundaries, and so a new solution is needed. VMware and Cisco have a proprietary solution that uses Cisco’s Nexus 1000V virtual switch integrated with vSphere, but this solution doesn’t integrate with hypervisors from other vendors.

Instead, network virtualization gives you the ability to create VLANs across geographically and logically disparate networks. Each virtual network (vNetwork) can be isolated and managed separately from other vNetworks, giving IT the power to create vNetworks based on applications that extend from on-premise infrastructure to public cloud infrastructure.

Any node, in any location, can be registered as part of a vNetwork, whether it’s a physical server, virtual server, on-premise, or in a public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud. Each node receives virtual MAC and IP addresses unique to the vNetwork, allowing data to flow solely through the vNetwork.

Source: vCider

This is different from a VLAN, which traditionally required configuring ports on your physical switch to make the connected device part of the VLAN. vNetwork switches are pure software implementations of network switches, providing more flexibility over the configuration of the network, with the ability to bring nodes from public IaaS clouds (e.g. Amazon EC2) and servers rented from hosting providers (e.g. Rackspace) all into a single vNetwork.

vNetworks Sound Great on Paper

If you have a network at all resembling the examples shown on vCider’s website (a startup in the network virtualization space), vNetworks will provide at least two key benefits to network management:

Flexibility. Organizations are looking to optimize costs and operational efficiency by moving workloads to the least expensive platform and to improve service availability by building application delivery networks and high availability configurations. vNetwork software makes this possible.
Platform agnosticism. Existing solutions from Cisco and VMware are proprietary and only work in Cisco networks supporting VMware environments. However, a new breed of vNetwork solutions from vCider, Nicira, and Big Switch Networks will provide you with the ability to manage virtual machines running on multiple hypervisors or cloud servers from multiple providers, all on a network that could be built on HP, Dell, Cisco, and Aruba networking gear.

This is Just the Beginning

At the moment, these solutions are working at layer 3 (the network layer) of the OSI stack. That is a good and natural place to be, given the path selection and internetworking capabilities embedded at that layer. Ideally, virtual switches would also operate at layer 4, providing great control over TCP and UDP connections, fostering end-to-end connectivity as well.

In the meantime, vCider, Nicira, and Big Switch are all very young companies with, for the most part, unproven solutions. Only vCider’s solution has launched and is commercially available, though both vCider and Big Switch showcased their products at GigaOM Structure 2011.

Initially, these products will support the most well-known cloud IaaS and networking vendors – Amazon, Rackspace, Cisco – and then move to other vendors with less market share. If you didn’t jump on the Amazon and Rackspace bandwagon, instead waiting for a cloud IaaS provider that would better suit your needs, you’ll have to wait a bit longer for a vNetwork solution.

There are really two key takeaways network professionals need to take from this:

Network virtualization will solve problems to do with cloud bursting, workload optimization, and connecting applications running on disparate networks. This will make it easier for businesses to manage those applications, regardless of where the instance is running.
Paired with cloud orchestration and automation software, vNetworks put us one step closer to being able to dynamically, and automatically, shift workloads from one infrastructure to another while being able to maintain a persistent network configuration.

The bottom line is that virtual networks, or vNetworks, are coming on the scene to solve a problem: managing public cloud servers as a disparate network. When you can wrap your public cloud servers, rented dedicated servers, and on-premise servers into a single vNetwork because they all belong to the same application or department, the promise of workload optimization and dynamic reallocation gets one step closer to reality.

Celebrating Success in London

Inspired by a London Free Press moderated roundtable that included several people I have a huge amount of respect for, like Jodi Simpson, Kevin Van Lierop and Chantelle Diachina, I want to spent some time talking about some of the tech-related companies and individuals in London that are doing good things in and for the community, but are also striving in London’s highly underrated tech scene.

rTraction - a highly skilled, well-respected web development and online marketing firm that services many non-profits in the city
Echidna Solutions – another great web development firm who has donated a lot of their time to efforts like Emerging Leaders
Info-Tech Research Group – one of the top 10 IT research firms in the world, rated as the best IT research firm by Outsell (full disclosure: I work at ITRG)
Resolution Interactive Media – a very talented group of web developers best known for their online training site built for LHSC, and highly interactive websites for several Ontario colleges
Big Blue Bubble – a local video game development company, probably best known for Burn The Rope right now
Antic Entertainment – local video game development company that has won awards for their game Junk Battles
Start Communications – an Internet service provider, with their own network around downtown London, that customers have been raving about ever since the UBB debate flared up earlier this year
Aaron McGowan – a well-respected, and very talented, freelance programmer that specializes in mobile apps and mobile websites
Digital Extremes – a large video game developer that’s produced several blockbuster titles like BioShock, Unreal Tournament, Homefront and Dark Sector

And there are lots of others, most of which can be seen on TechAlliance’s Member Directory. For instance, I bet you didn’t know that DirectDial.com is owned by EK3 Technologies, which is based in London. I’m not going to sit here and boast about my company, Orpheum Hosting Solutions, but I do believe Orpheum’s providing a much needed service to freelancers and small business owners!

So really, I won’t sit here and listen to people complain about the lack of a tech industry in London. No, we’re not Santa Clara, California (in the heart of Silicon Valley). But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an industry to break into, or a need that’s going unserved. In fact, if you’re feeling frustrated with your attempts to find a job as a developer or networking professional, London has enough small businesses that the right business plan and marketing will get you the opportunity to do plenty of work. I used to freelance and got the opportunity to build computer networks from scratch for several businesses, and I knew a lot less then than I do now.

Here’s the video.

One Way Forward

Canada. Canada has survived and thrived over the past 144 years thanks to good leadership, determination, and vision. A vision of a nation designed to provide the most essential human rights we all deserve, while providing the opportunity for people to define their own destiny. But that ability is being threatened. Threatened the powers that be who are willing to stifle our democracy, continue to widen the gap between the rich and the poor, and put additional tax burden on your daily lives. Taxes, both literal and figurative, that will come in the form of higher levies on blank CDs and DVDs, a stifling of innovation by the absolute demolishing of fair use laws, an inability to get the country connected to high speed internet, so-called “support” for students that only aggravates the problem many students already have paying back student loans, allowing more and more seniors to fall below the poverty line, superprisons for unreported crime, and funding cuts for organizations that support the victims of crime. And all this leaving the sandwich generation with less time and money to help their kids or look after their ill and aging parents.

It’s a dismal state that must be corrected.

Canadians need choice. Canadians need freedom. Canadians need security. And most of all, when things get rough, Canadians need support. What they don’t need is a government that is so eager to put them in prison that they’re going to spend billions of dollars on new American-style superprisons. What Canadians don’t need is a government that seems hellbent on turning us into a warmongering nation, spending billions of dollars on jets without engines, and forgoing our previously well-known reputation for being peacekeepers. What Canada doesn’t need, or want, is to leave our neighbours and families out in the cold when they need our help the most.

It’s high time we stood up for the country we live in. Now is the time where we must look to the future and decide what we want this country to look like, to act like at home and around the world, and how we want to be seen amongst our peers. We have a very serious choice to make, and it can make or break this country.

In order to survive and thrive in the next 144 years, this nation has but one way forward. We need to invest in ourselves, in our communities, and in the way of life we hold dear. That means making decisive, wise choices in how we spend our money, how we treat the future leaders of this land, and how we treat those that are suffering.

We need to invest in our children and grandchildren. Students need genuine help getting to and through school, and that’s why the Liberal Party’s platform introduced the Learning Passport, providing up to $1500 per year for students that get the grades, and deserve to get a post-secondary education.

That’s why the Liberal Party platform brings back the deal it signed with the provinces, that was killed by Stephen Harper and the Conservatives, ensuring each province has the ability to get the funding they need in order to train new early childhood educators, create more childcare spaces, and help parents out in the way they need to most.

Canadians should have the right to take the time off work you need to look after your parents without being penalized for it. That’s why they want to create a new Family Care Employment Insurance Benefit, so that caregivers take six months off work to care for gravely ill family members at home; and on top of that a new Family Care Tax Benefit worth up to $1,350 annually, to help low- and middle-income family caregivers manage the costs associated with looking after their parents.

And, of course, those who need the healthcare system should feel comfortable knowing that it will be there to take care of them thoroughly, efficiently, with the best care possible. The federal government has to continue to work with the provinces to make that a priority now and in the future.

We need to expand and enhance the Canada Pension Plan, before it starts having the same problems the U.S. Social Security Plan has. Canadians need to know the CPP will be there for them, and will make a meaningful impact on their retirement lifestyles. Canadians have also been clear that existing retirement saving methods aren’t enough. That’s why the Liberal Party has proposed a Secure Retirement Option – an enhancement to the CPP that’s voluntary, leaving you with the choice to participate or not, and not run by the banks.

We need to ensure that affordable housing is available, that we leave this country and planet cleaner than it was when we came into it, where service to your community is recognized and rewarded, and where the arts get just as much respect as our office workers, construction workers, and doctors do. Canadians need to know that the food on their table not only tastes great, but is good for them and won’t make them sick. And rural Canada, in all its forms, finally get the respect it deserves from the cities it feeds.

That’s the Canada you deserve. That’s the Canada I want to live in. Anything less is unacceptable.

And when we can afford it, we will reduce taxes. We will reduce personal income taxes. We will reduce business taxes. But we can’t go on running the country as if printing more money is the answer. This all has to be done responsibly and with a level head recognizing the situation for what it is, and the implications of where money comes from, and how it’s spent.

So join me in voting for a Canada we can all be proud of. Vote for your local Liberal candidate, and give them the mandate to turn this country around and into one that all Canadians can be proud of, and is once again respected on the world stage. Our livelihoods depend on it.

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Derek E. Silva

Working towards better.