The Mixed Feelings award of the week goes to Doug Gourlay and his Why FCoE is Dead, But Not Buried Yet article. While I agree with everything he’s saying about L2 and L3, the FCoE part of the post is shaky enough to generate tons of comments (or maybe that was the goal). For a hilarious perspective on the same topic, read Fiber Channel and Ethernet – the odd couple.

And here are the other great articles I stumbled upon during the last few days:

Data Center and Virtualization

Internet-as-a-Service in a shared MPLS cloud. Derick definitely knows what MPLS is and how it can be used in enterprise environments.

Fantastic Nexus 1000V Features Mindmap from Yandy the Packet Maniac.

Cisco Catalyst 6500 Supervisor 2T Technical Highlights from Ethan Banks. Must-read if you’re sitting anywhere close to a Cat6500.

VXLANs and the Cloud Infrastructure Suite – the “official” VMware’s view of VXLAN.

Can HP Make It in Networking? You know how much I love Gartner&co, but once in a blue moon, there’s an analyst article worth linking to.

The End of the Infrastructure Engineer? by Scott Lowe – excellent article & great comments. We’re definitely not going away, but it doesn’t hurt if you understand more about how other Data Center technologies (servers, storage and virtualization) work and know a little bit about applications ... which brings me to the next category of links:

Web apps and Scalability

Five steps to scaling any database. Making sure your applications don’t overload the database is the first step, but there are a few others worth considering (note: sharding is the last one on the list).

Protecting against XSS attacks – most of the books and code samples programmers happily cut-and-paste into their applications are vulnerable to XSS attacks. No wonder nobody bothers attacking TCP stacks anymore; there are so many easier targets out there.