Networking

Feeling the need for speed and making it happen

By Mark Guinther

“I feel the need…The need for speed!!”  Quoting old movies is where my similarities to Tom Cruise end, but it is a relevant line for today’s networking equipment.  Faster applications is one of the last steps in getting faster results to subscribers, resulting in happy subscribers which means happy service providers, happy service providers mean happy equipment providers, and… well, you get the point: Everybody is happier when their network runs faster. However, it’s getting tougher given the ever-increasing flood of data on today’s networks.    

Bigger, faster pipes are a start, but you can have the best infrastructure plumbing in the world and still have poor performance if your system and applications are a bottleneck.  Imagine a single lane bridge on an 8 lane highway and you are driving a Ferrari. Regardless of how fast your car can go, and how many lanes are available,  you don’t make much progress during rush hour because of that one single chokepoint at the bridge.  Likewise, a high capacity network doesn’t help unless your network equipment applications can keep up.  That means your systems need to be efficient when getting packets off the wire, through the kernel(s), to the right core, and peeling off the protocol layers to get those golden nuggets of rich web pages, pictures, files, and VoIP conversations.

The latest Wind River Network Acceleration Platform is  software designed to make efficient use of multicore silicon from the wire to the application, allowing network performance to efficiently scale with the number of cores in a processor, so you can clear the way for that Ferrari and enjoy real speed. After all, how much fun can it be if you can’t go really fast?

Red Hat is NOT Carrier-Grade Linux

By Glenn Seiler

There was a very interesting announcement yesterday from Red Hat regarding a collaboration with Nokia for carrier grade server systems. The most interesting thing I noticed about this news was how the term “Carrier Grade Linux” was not mentioned once in the entire document. There were several mentions of Carrier Grade Servers – it even went so far as calling them Enterprise Servers, but not one mention of Carrier Grade Linux.

One of the really beneficial things about standards like the OSDL’s Carrier Grade Linux is that they exemplify the very best practices in open source. Carrier Grade Linux is an open specification that 6 different Linux vendors have compliance with. This compliance delivers the promised value of open source: avoiding monopoly, delivering a level playing field and avoiding vendor lock-in. Funny thing that Red Hat is the only major Linux vendor that is not participating in the Carrier Grade Linux standards effort. I guess if you consider yourself the Microsoft of the Linux world, then you might falsely think that you ARE the standard. I like to believe that logic always prevails and Red Hat might do well to think through this premise: if you are NOT supporting the accepted standards than you must be NON-STANDARD!

What exactly does this collaboration amount to then? Good question. My guess is that  Red Hat is simply packaging its enterprise server together with Nokia’s Carrier Grade hardware and claiming to have a telecommunications solution. Last time I checked there were a lot of telecommunications solutions that are based on PowerPC processors and processors from MIPS licensees like Broadcom, Cavium and others. Umm. I wonder how those solutions can run “server” Linux? The takeaway here is that there is a big difference between “server” Linux and Carrier Grade Linux -  but with this announcement, Red Hat is trying very hard to pull the wool over this little fact.

I guess if you have a very rigid server architecture based strictly on an Intel-based processor and you don’t modify or customize the software at all, then it is probably reasonable to use an inflexible, rigid operating system that is not based on Telecommunications standards. For the rest of us, I think we’ll continue to drive best open source practices and participate in the Carrier Grade Linux standards effort. This collaboration allows companies to leverage Carrier Grade Linux across multiple processors and device types and thus delivers the true promise of open source; product re-use, no vendor lock-in and standards based.