HDD

NVMe, NVMe over Fabrics and RDMA for network engineers

In the past, the evolution of network-based storage was not really a problem for network engineers: the network was fast and the spinning hard drives were slow. Natural network upgrades to 10Gb, 40Gb, and 100Gb Ethernet were more than sufficient to meet the networking needs of storage systems.
But now, with the introduction of ultra-fast solid-state disks (SSDs) and Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), this is no longer true! Storage teams now have the ability to potentially saturate the network with incredibly fast devices.

Cisco GIR

Cisco NX-OS Graceful Insertion and Removal (GIR)

If you operate a data-center network with Cisco Nexus, you’ve probably already faced the problem of how to perform a maintenance on one of the two switches of a vPC pair, with minimum impact and risks for the production network. Cisco NX-OS contains a feature called “Graceful Insertion and Removal” or GIR to help you for that. Here is how it works.