Arista steps outside the data center with Cloud Connect solution

The rise of virtualization has had a profound impact on the technology industry. In the networking industry, perhaps no vendor has ridden the wave of cloud more than Arista Networks. The company was founded a little over a decade ago, and today it is a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of over $4.6 billion.

 

However, almost all of Arista's revenues today come from selling products inside the data center. The company was one of the most aggressive vendors in pushing the concept of a spine/leaf architecture as a replacement for a traditional multi-tier network.
This week, Arista announced its first solution that is outside the data center. The Arista Cloud Connect solution connects public and private cloud data centers. Moving into the data center interconnect market is a logical extension for Arista and highlights just how far merchant silicon has come over the past decade.
Years ago, merchant silicon was used primarily in low-performance network devices like wiring closet or branch office switches. However, merchant has come a long way and is now widely used in both leaf and spine switches. Obviously, merchant alone hasn't caused this shift. Arista has made the most of off-the-shelf silicon by coupling it with its data center-class EOS operating system.

Cloud interconnects are ripe for change as well. Legacy data center connections remind me a lot of where the data center was five years ago. Active – standby, proprietary protocols, over-engineering, and little to no encryption is still the norm in many deployments.
Today's cloud environments need the same characteristics as what's found inside the data center, where multi-path, open standards, and multi-use platforms are used. In a sense, what Arista has done is extend its spine networking platform to extend outside the data center with the following cloud interconnect use cases.

• Spine transit. Arista has added a long-haul, Coherent DWDM 6 port 100 Gbps line card with bit 56 MACsec encryption to its 7500E spine switch. The link card has 96 channels in C-band with a total transmission capacity of 10 Tbps. This is the company's first layer 1 product and can connect data centers that are up to 5000km apart. Arista has an advantage over the optical pure plays in that it can offer a consolidated, single box solution instead of requiring three, separate boxes for switching, encryption, and DWDM. 
• Spine interconnect using VXLAN for layer 2 fabric extension. Currently, if a cloud provider wanted to connect two data center fabrics, it would need to do so by manipulating MPLS, which can be a complicated process, or utilizing some kind of proprietary, vendor-specific protocol that can have limitations down the road when another product is introduced. The use of VXLAN introduces a simple, standards-based way of creating a layer 2 interconnection between clouds.
• Spine peering. This is Arista's solution to connect clouds at layer 3 that doesn't require the purchase of an expensive Internet router. The primary reason organizations had to use routers at cloud interconnection points was the requirement to hold the full Internet routing table, which can exceed 1 million routes. Routers do provide a tremendous amount of value at certain points in the network, but they are overkill for cloud peering. Arista has developed a feature called Selective Route Download (SRD), where only the routes that are required (about 60,000) are carried into the hardware table. Arista estimates that it can cover about 90% of the traffic with these routes, creating an excellent, lower-cost alternative to a dedicated router.

Merchant silicon has come a long way over the past several years. Arista has taken advantage of advancements in this market and combined it with its highly flexible and programmatic operating system, EOS, to create competitive differentiation inside the data center. It's new Cloud Connect solutions brings the same cost benefits to cloud providers looking to interconnect data centers at layer one, two or three.

Read More

Cisco updates CCIE, CCNA certifications: What you need to know

This week, Cisco announced some changes to its CCIE Data Center and CCNA Security certifications to prepare IT pros for the evolving IT landscape.

One of the ways to measure an engineer's value is by the number of certifications that he or she holds. In networking, the gold standard has always been Cisco certifications (disclosure: Cisco is a client of ZK Research). The company has a wide range of certifications, ranging from the entry-level Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) and culminating with the difficult-to-achieve but highly valued Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE). The perception of CCIEs is so high that the term has become part of networking vernacular. When describing difficult network challenges, it's common to say that a particularly complex issue was so complicated that "even a team of CCIEs couldn't solve it."

Salary Survey 2016: How does your compensation stack up?

Computerworld’s annual IT Salary Survey results are in. Find out what your peers said about their
Read Now

One of the reasons the certifications have been so highly valued for so long is that Cisco has done a great job of continually evolving the programs as times change. This week, Cisco announced some major changes to its CCIE Data Center and CCNA Security certifications to bring them in line with the digital era.
The changes to the CCIE framework are to ensure that the certification is aligned with the evolution of the role of IT and an engineer's ability to produce business outcomes. The technical aspects of CCIE will continue to live on, but Cisco is trying to raise the bar on those who carry a certification that indicates being a leader in the IT industry.
This week's news is centered around changes to CCIE Data Center, but in practicality Cisco is revising the charger for all of its expert-level CCIE and Cisco Certified Design Expert (CCDE) certifications to ensure that individuals carrying these titles can have meaningful business conversations about new technical areas that are causing organizations to rethink their business strategies.

Updates to the programs include a new way of assessing individuals to ensure certified individuals have working knowledge and skill in many emerging areas, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), network programmability, cloud, and business transformation. Also, there will be unified written and lab exam topics for candidates to demonstrate holistic knowledge of exam domain.
Regarding the certifications that Cisco announced are changing, the CCIE Data Center version 2.0 requires skills focused on advanced data center solutions needed to design, implement, and troubleshoot today's modern data center. This includes skills focused on end-to-end management of the environment, policy-based infrastructure, advanced virtualization, automation, and orchestration. Cisco has also added a requirement for building skills in IoT, software defined networking (SDN), cloud, and their impact on architectures and deployment models.
The new CCNA Security builds the skills required to deploy secure infrastructure, implement security controls, enforce policies, and assist in addressing security issues. One of the big changes in the refreshed CCNA is that it now expands the focus of security from just the network to a broader, end-to-end IT security purview. Exam topics will now included new but critical technologies, such as 802.11x, ISE, BYOD, web security, FirePOWER, FireSIGHT, cloud, virtualization, and advanced malware protection.
Digitization is changing business, and this is creating the requirement for new jobs, most of which didn't exist a few years ago. It's critical that IT professionals keep up with current technologies, or they'll see their careers go the way of the mainframe administer and voice manager. Cisco's changes to its certification program ensure that the careers of the certified professionals are aligned with the direction of digitization.

 

Read More

Baidu driverless car completes test on Beijing roads

Chinese tech giant Baidu has successfully tested its driverless car on roads near the company's headquarters in Beijing.
The 30km (18.6 miles) test route required a modified BMW 3 Series to navigate "complex road conditions", including human drivers, the firm said.
The car executed a range of manoeuvres, including U-turns, lane changes and merging into traffic from ramps.
Baidu has amassed a library of 3D road maps to guide its autonomous vehicles.
"Fully autonomous driving under mixed road conditions is universally challenging, with complexity further heightened by Beijing's road conditions and unpredictable driver behaviour," said Wang Jing, senior vice-president of Baidu and general manager of the company's Autonomous Driving Business Unit.
Baidu's highly automated driving (HAD) maps capture road data in 3D to within a few centimetres of accuracy, according to the company.
The car is able to detect vehicles, road lanes and objects in its path.

Samsung shake-up

Separately, South Korean firm Samsung announced that it would be launching a new division which will make car components for automotive vehicles.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the company will begin by developing in-car entertainment, or infotainment, systems.
"It sounds a sensible move for them - whether it's driver assistance or towards automation, there's going to be a lot of development of the sensors, communications and the cloud computing," Alan Stevens, at the UK's Transport Research Laboratory, told the BBC.
As for Baidu's prototype, Mr Stevens pointed out that the particular roads chosen for the test route would be indicative of the car's true capabilities.
"I wonder whether we're talking about very well made-up highways with good markings, the question is how does it work in more rural areas," he said.

Self-driving derby

Competition is certainly heating up in the driverless vehicle space. Recently, German manufacturer Daimler tested a self-driving truck in motorway traffic.
And a Japanese firm, Robot Taxi, has developed a plan to provide self-driving cars to people in Kanagawa, south of Tokyo, in 2016.
It's not all plain sailing, however.
Google's prototype has been involved in nine crashes since testing on public roads began, though the company has said these are all the fault of humans, not the car's autonomous technology.
In one incident, for example, people in a Google-piloted Lexus suffered whiplash after a human-driven car crashed into the back of it while it was waiting in traffic.
Finally, Elon Musk's high tech firm Tesla has had to limit the automatic steering and lane changing functions in its autopilot mode for drivers in Hong Kong.
A report in the International Business Times said that Hong Kong's Transport Department was still reviewing the software to ensure that it complied with the country's regulations.

Read More