Just prior to Networking Field Day, the merry band of geeks sat down with Chip Copper, Brocade’s Solutioneer (a job title almost as good as Packet Herder) to discuss the intricate details of VCS Fabric. The videos are well worth watching – the technical details are interesting, but above all, Chip is a fantastic storyteller.

The event was split in four parts:

What is an Ethernet fabric? – a great explanation of Brocade’s view of what a Data Center fabric should be, made even better by Chip’s campfire stories.

Converged Networking and Storage – I skipped this one; there is only so much FCoE I can take and we had a half-day FCoE discussion with Cisco’s Omar Sultan and J Metz a day before.

Multi-Path vs Multi-Chassis – nice discussion of layer-2 multipathing, Brocade’s inter-switch links and load balancing, and the impacts of non-symmetrical network connectivity on traffic flow.

Hard Cores and Soft Edges – given the realities of simplistic hypervisor soft switches, Brocade’s Automatic Migration of Port Profiles (AMPP) gives the networking engineers an interesting toolbox that could make their life easier. Chip did a fantastic job explaining how AMPP works.

More information

If you need to know more about data centers or network virtualization:

• Start with Introduction to Virtualized Networking;
• Discover generic data center technologies and designs in Data Center 3.0 for Networking Engineer, data center fabric technologies in Data Center Fabric Architectures, and the large-scale designs in Clos Fabrics Explained webinar.
• Dive deep into the mysteries of VMware’s vSwitch and other VMware-related networking solutions with the VMware Networking Deep Dive.

And don’t forget: you get access to all these webinars (and numerous others) if you buy the yearly subscription.