Tech Bytes

The Packet Pushers had a briefing with Path Solutions’ CTO Tim Titus via a web conference on September 26, 2017.

Who’s Path Solutions? They are in the network management space, providing a tool that offers VoIP and network root cause troubleshooting. PathSolutions talks about “minding the gaps” making the point that their solution is supposed to fill in the gaps that general purpose network management systems leave behind.

In this briefing, PathSolutions gave us a live demo of their product to demonstrate its value. Ethan Banks shares his impressions from that demo.

For more information about PathSolutions, visit http://pathsolutions.com.

Cisco announced the ISR1000 today and there are some thoughts about this product.

Link: Introducing a New Era in Branch Routing – https://blogs.cisco.com/enterprise/isr1000series

Link: Cisco 1100 Series Integrated Services Routers Data Sheet – Cisco – https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/1000-series-integrated-services-routers-isr/datasheet-c78-739512.html

Link: Branch Routers – Cisco – https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/routers/branch-routers/index.html

Background

6Wind has announced support for ARM CPUs in a briefing released today, Link in the show notes.

Link: 6WIND Announces Arm® Processor Support for High Performance Networking – http://www.6wind.com/news-events/press-releases-2017/6wind-press-october-10-2017/ 

Many people in networking may not have heard of 6Wind but their software is inside many Enterprise and carrier devices. They often license the software as a component that is widely used by branded networking vendors. The main focus in IPsec and SSL VLAN but the software is packet processing engine that can be used for many tasks. Its often used in SD-WAN products today

6WIND software scales across networking architectures with a choice of bare metal and virtual machine (VM) deployments:

* Server with standard NICs: x86 and Arm support for servers

* Server with Smart NICs: x86 and Arm support for servers and Arm and MIPS support for Smart NICs

* Appliance: x86, Arm and MIPS support

Why You Care ? 

Lots of vendors are moving their applications into virtual appliances. Its taken a long time for people to accept that a VM is acceptable. Now we are seeing diversity in CPU architecture.

I don’t see Enterprise using ARM for a while, thats probably too scary for most people,  but 6Wind has been strong in the custom device market for quite some time. So I expect this to be attractive there.

Mellanox & HPE have partnered to offer Ethernet Storage Fabrics to HPE Storage customers. If you have a Simplivity distributed storage you can’t use your legacy 3-tier tree design, and you can’t use a 4:1 oversubscribed Leaf/Spine. They just don’t work when the storage cluster reconverts.

References

Link: HPE OEM – Mellanox Technologies – http://www.mellanox.com/oem/hpe/

Link: Mellanox HPE Joint Solutions Reference Guide – http://www.mellanox.com/oem/hpe/rel_docs/HPE_and_Mellanox_Joint_Solutions_v1_10_11_16v3.pdf

Vendor Briefing Deck :  Mellanox HPE Ethernet Storage Fabric Briefing Deck 20170927

Pluribus Networks has partnered with D-Link to put the Netvisor OS on D-Link’s DXS-5000 open networking switch series. Ethan Banks shares the story, reported September 25, 2017.

For More Information

* Pluribus Networks Adds D-Link Systems as an Open Networking Partner