The successful architecture for a top-of-rack switch for data center

TOR switch architecture

We wrote before about Arista switches and about the Arista EOS architecture (network OS). A company with a name Pica8 is another example that follows a very similar technological model. They use the best out of the Linux and butter this up with some more hardware (ASIC) dependent software to achieve maximal performance.

What is interesting for Pica8 is that they take a very liberal approach to the hardware itself. They say they could use any plain switching chip or motherboard blades and turn it into a fully operational switch. The secret is once again a well design Pica8 network OS they built.

In comparison to Arista CLI (that is very alike the Cisco one) Pica8 uses a rather different syntax: http://pica8.org/blogs/?p=399. At first glance it has some similarities to what you typie on Juniper boxes :).

More info about them and products can be found here:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/102810-pica8-opensource-switching.html?page=1
http://www.pica8.com/open-switching/1-gbe-10gbe-open-switches.php

Top 10 data center network vendor list

In previous post was saw how handful the Gartner magic quadrants can be when learning and researching particular technology or industry trend:

• New 2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas)
• Rackspace and Brocade pushing ADX platform

Below is an another comparison chart, this time targeting vendor network equipment in data centers.

By the way I was investigating this because of the networks vendor selection on this cloud hardware deployment calculator (How to estimate hardware requirements for your private Openstack deployment ) : Dell, Cisco, HP, Arista, Juniper, Brocade.

What cloud provider do you use

Every one knows that there is a number of cloud players there on the market. Some of them have been there from the beginning like Amazon some of the others are new like Google with the recent release of Google Compute Engine (GCE)[1].

These links gave you a list of some of the big names behind the ongoing cloud adoption and industry transformation:

• http://gigaom.com/cloud/amazon-is-no-1-whos-next-in-cloud-computing/
• http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2012/enterprise2/040912-ecs-iaas-companies-257611.html

But these information is only a listing of possible vendors to chose from. But how is the market shared between them. These questions are not answered there. There is a little bit of publicly available documents on the Internet that elaborate on it as well.

This is one of the links I found on the Openstack mailing list that give us a small inside view to this problem: Cloud tools survey

The most interesting results are listed in point # 4 and 5.

4. Which clouds do you use (choose all that are appropriate)?
Amazon: 47.4%
Rackspace: 36.8%
HP Cloud: 21.1%
Go Grid: 0%
Linode: 31.6%
Softlayer: 0%
Joyent: 0%
Azure: 5.3%
Google: 10.5%
Private Cloud: 42.1%
Other responses included AppFog, OrionVM (Australian provider), KT UCloud Biz (Korean provider), eNoCloud and Physical Servers.

5. How many cloud based servers do you manage (not physical servers)?
1-10: 45.5%
11-50: 27.3%
50-200: 9.1%
200-1000: 18.2%
1000+: 0%
A lot of fairly large deployments – many of them appear to be private clouds (who responded via the OpenStack list).

References

1. http://cloud.google.com/products/compute-engine.html

Links to Cloud provider web management consoles

For each cloud provider you have to learn what are the most important links and how to use their tools. Below is a short list in alfabetical order of these I came across.

• Amazon Web Service (AWS) management console

https://console.aws.amazon.com 

• HP Cloud based on Openstack management console 

https://console.hpcloud.com 

• Rackspace Cloud Control Panel (FirstGen Cloud) 

https://lon.manage.rackspacecloud.com 
https://manage.rackspacecloud.com 

• Rackspace Cloud Control Panel (NextGen Cloud base on Openstack)

https://mycloud.rackspace.com