Tech Bytes

A transcript of the audio you can listen to above follows.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s June 13, 2018, and here’s what’s happening. I had a briefing with Rubrik’s technical marketing team on June 5th.

Who Is Rubrik?

Rubrik is an explosively growing data protection company. Gartner positions them in the Data Center Backup & Recovery Solutions category. If you have been reviewing your multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, and on premises backup schemes and haven’t evaluated Rubrik, you should. They are winning a lot of deals.

In this briefing, Rubrik discussed many aspects of their Alta 4.2 software release. The feature expansion, improved service offering, and overall enhancement list is quite long. One highlight is that of Rubrik’s ecosystem expansion, where Alta 4.2 offers AWS native protection for EC2, VMware vCloud Director integration, Windows full volume protection, as well as AIX & Solaris support. All of that feeds into Rubrik’s core value proposition of protecting your data no matter where it is.

Let’s Drill Into Alta 4.2’s AWS Native Protection For EC2 Instances

What Rubrik’s done here is take their history of using native APIs to backup hypervisor-based platforms from VMware and Microsoft, as well as apps like SQL Server, and apply that native API philosophy to AWS EC2. Rubrik is using AWS’s native abilities to take snapshots of block volumes. This works whether the Rubrik instance is on premises, or in your cloud.

The big deal here is that this helps automate lifecycle management for EC2 snapshots, formerly something that had to be done manually. Backing up? AWS makes that easy enough. But tracking each snapshot…up to you, which is what Rubrik is helping with here.

With Rubrik managing the EC2 snapshots, you have the benefit of a management system that can rapidly assist with recovery. Rubrik knows about your EC2 snapshots and what’s in them, meaning you can use Rubrik to quickly do a restore. In fact, Rubrik demoed a simple restore from a snapshot of just a couple of clicks through the GUI dashboard familiar to Rubrik customers, compared to at least 5 discreet CLI steps required within AWS if a customer were to perform this task by hand.

A related simplification is that of file-level recovery. Rubrik demoed being able to search their index of EC2 snapshots for a specific file and restore it. This is a major enhancement over the AWS method of file restoration, where an EC2 snapshot would have to be individually mounted and searched manually for the lost file.

Another benefit of using Rubrik to manage these snapshots is the ability to put EC2 instances where you need them. Want to replicate an instance in a different availability zone or region? You can do that without a lot of drama via the Rubrik interface.

You might have thought of this already, but yet another benefit is that you’re gaining the ability to manage all of your data across your IT environment in one place. If Rubrik can manage the data in question, you don’t have to go to multiple toolsets to handle backups, restores, queries, and so on. Rubrik is doing their very best to make sure that no matter where your data is, they can protect it and unify the management of it. Just because some data is in the cloud and some other data is on premises, the process shouldn’t have to be different, according to the Rubrik philosophy.

For More Information

For more information about Rubrik, AWS Native Protection for EC2 Instances, and the rest of the long list of new features available in Alta 4.2, visit rubrik.com. Right on the front page, they’ve got a splash about the Alta 4.2 announcement. I barely scratched the surface of e…

A transcript of the audio you can play above follows.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary.

I’m Ethan Banks, it’s June 12th, 2018, and here’s what’s happening.

I had a briefing with Donyel Jones-Williams, Director of Product Marketing Management at Juniper Networks last week.

Juniper is one of the largest networking companies in the world with several divisions. This news was focused on Juniper’s service provider customers. Juniper made some forward looking announcements regarding upcoming hardware aimed at making the packet onslaught caused by IoT sensor data and 5G deployments easier to cope with.

All of these announcements center around a new MX Series 5G Universal Routing platform.

First up is the announcement of the MX10008 and MX10016 Universal Chassis. These join the existing PTX and QFX Universal Chassis products, meaning that the same chassis can run line cards from 3 different product lines, making it easier for customers to reposition the roles of these chassis without having to do a full rip and replace.

The MX10008 and MX10016 will be available during the second half of 2018.

Secondly, we have new silicon in the works. Penta chipsets will be 50% more power efficient when compared to Junos Trio chipsets. Penta silicon will also feature MACSEC and a native IP-Sec inline crypto engine, which Juniper claims is an industry first. Penta will also support flexible native Ethernet support (FlexE).

Juniper says that Penta-powered line cards for the familiar MX960, MX480 and MX240 chassis’ will be available in Q1 2019.

The final bit of news has to do with Control User-Plane Separation (CUPS) hardware acceleration. Juniper says that the MX Series 5G will support a standards-based 5G user-plane on the MX platform. This will allow for wireless and wireline services on the same box, but also allowing for third-party 5G control planes. What’s the big deal here? Scaling. Juniper is pushing the idea that hardware-accelerated CUPS matters, rather than doing CUPS virtualized. The bet is that large 5G deployments will require high performance to be successful, therefore, hardware acceleration will drive 5G scaling.

New CUPS support will be available in the first half of 2019.

Although these are forward looking announcements, Juniper states that they have demoed interoperability already, and plan to release some of that information in the coming months.

For More Information

Head over to http://newsroom.juniper.net/ and find additional details on this announcement.

A transcript of the audio that you can play above follows.

Welcome to Briefings In Brief, an audio digest of IT news and information from the Packet Pushers, including vendor briefings, industry research, and commentary. I’m Ethan Banks, it’s June 5th, 2018, and here’s what’s happening.

I had a briefing with DriveScale on May 31st. Who’s DriveScale? DriveScale is a storage company, whose main product is software to centrally manage and share disk for clustered applications and big data environments. File under buzzword “software composable infrastructure.”

A central DriveScale chassis filled with disk is attached to the network in the same rack as the compute that needs it. DriveScale software makes sure that all compute nodes in the rack have as much storage as they need, but does away with the waste that direct attached storage sometimes experiences in this environments.

In this briefing, DriveScale announced Software Composable Infrastructure for Flash, which they claim is a market first. Flash storage is all about high bandwidth and low latency, and the latest NVMe flash drives have ferocious network-filling capability. If you think serving storage over Ethernet is a performance compromise, think again.

Quoting the official DriveScale press release,

“DriveScale’s SCI for Flash is available as software, capable of being deployed on a variety of hardware systems. These include DriveScale’s own Composable Flash System and Western Digital’s Ultrastar Serv24-HA. The system combines the speed of up to 24 dual-ported NVMe™ drives, four 100 Gbit Ethernet ports and a dual-server architecture to deliver IT operations high performance and high availability flash storage in a composable system.”

These systems are sometimes known as EBOFs, or Ethernet-attached Bunch of Flash. DriveScale described their EBOF to me as containing 2 controllers each with 2x100G Ethernet ports. That’s a 400G of pipe from the ToR switch to the EBOF. The controllers handle converting Ethernet to NVMe. DriveScale sells the empty chassis, allowing their channel partners to populate the chassis with NVMe drives of their choice. Again, remember that DriveScale is primarily a software company.

In case your mind snapped at the thought of a bunch of disks being able to fill 100Gbps Ethernet channels, have a listen to the Datanauts podcast episode 111, where we talk with storage expert J Metz about NVMe and its network impact.

To connect to the EBOFs, there are two communications protocols supported. Most environments are going to use iSCSI. But RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is also supported, but obviously you need an RDMA fabric for this, something Mellanox might have sold you. RoCE is the “ultimate performance” solution. Looking down the road, NVMe-over-TCP is probably the final answer according to DriveScale, but NVMe-over-TCP is not standardized yet.

One of the drivers for this solution is cost optimization. Flash is expensive, still as much as 10x over spinning rust. DriveScale SCI allows for flash to be sliced, so that, in effect, partial drives can be presented to compute nodes, rather than having to use up an entire drive as happens when the drives are directly attached.

Other nifty capabilities include on-the-fly recomposability, keeping in step with the ephemeral container world. Public key authentication is centrally managed, and used to encrypt drives and connect drives to compute nodes. The central PKI management means that your encrypted drive data can move around as demanded by applications and still be decrypted.

Predictive analytics are also part of the solution, helping you to determine what data should go where to optimize storage system performance.

DriveScale was also just awarded the Cool Vendor designation in the cloud infrastructure area.…

Pica8 makes it first steps into network automation in a unique fashion with apps for its PicOS NOS. PicaFabric build a virtual switch chassis from an leaf/spine switch clister. The PicaPilot app builds vitual switch stack for fat tree L2 everywhere campus networks. All this is done with open hardware that you can mix & match.

Link: Show 382: Whitebox In The Enterprise With Pica8 (Sponsored) https://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/show-382-whitebox-enterprise-pica8-sponsored/

On 6 November 2017 in Episode 12 of Briefings in Brief, I speculated on what would happen with VMware’s acquisition of VeloCloud.

This week we see the launch of “NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud” and it’s time to update those thoughts.

Anuta Networks, which makes software to orchestrate physical and virtual network infrastructure, will launch a SaaS version of its product on June 1st.

The idea is to entice more customers into orchestration by releasing a cloud version that lets them ease into a deployment and start small. Anuta will offer Standard and Advanced versions of its service.

The company says it can manage devices from 45 vendors, including Cisco, Juniper, Arista, VMware, and Check Point.

You can get more details at antuanetworks.com.

I do a five minute review of the D-Link DGS-1510-52 managed Ethernet switch.

Want the short version? D-Link has the enterprise in mind here. The switch is loaded with lots of L2 capability including a robust security set. DGS-1510’s are also stackable, feature a non-blocking chipset, and even some limited L3 forwarding capability.

For the price, a switch from the DGS-1510 line might look good in your wiring closet. Interesting. Not quite how I’d expected this to go.

In this five minute audio encapsulation of what’s interesting to the Packet Pushers from the world of networking vendors, Ethan Banks summarizes a shiny new Gluware. Vaguely remember Glue Networks as this company specializing in automation of Cisco IWAN environments? Time has marched on, and Glue Networks has re-branded to Gluware.

Sure, Gluware can still whip a gnarly IWAN deployment into shape, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Gluware can automate your entire network if you like, or just certain parts of it depending on your needs. And they support 16 different network operating systems, so it’s not just a Cisco game they’re playing.

To us, Gluware looks like automation for your brownfield network that you’ll be able to adapt your existing operational processes to. Worth some proof of concept testing if you’re looking for automation that isn’t just Python and hope.

Have a listen in the player above to this short audio summary of a briefing I took from Neal Roche, CEO at Apposite Technologies. We talked about WAN emulation–what it is and what it’s not. We also cover enterprise use cases for WAN emulation. We touch on Apposite’s latest appliance, the Netropy 100G.

Anuta Networks has announced ATOM, a software platform that can automate and orchestrate the operation of multi-vendor network infrastructure.

ATOM is an evolution of and replacement for its existing NCX platform.

New Features Include:

* Support for over 40 vendors, including Cisco, Juniper, F5, and others

* Scalability to orchestrate up to one million devices

* A new microservices architecture using Docker containers for resiliency and cloud deployment

* Telemetry and analysis for closed-loop automation

Get more details at anutanetworks.com.