Nick Apuzzo is one of my oldest friends, and we had some time to sit down and talk about networking and servers. This podcast is the result of that discussion:
- How we met in 1985 at IBM Research in NY when Nick picked up his pre-product IBM RTPC
- Why I joined Nick at IBM Storage Systems Division in 1994, hint Adstar
- How Scott ended up in performance networking by way of NEC, Myricom and now Solarflare
- What a server is, and types of servers by purpose, CRM, ERP, Dropbox, etc..
- Servers that are pre-built called appliances
- What types of connections do these typically have?
- How computing and servers have changed over the years.
- Types of networking available to servers, gigabit Ethernet versus 10Gb Ethernet and beyond
- What about 25 GbE and 40GbE?
- Copper cables versus fiber optic, and limitations.
- Connectors, SFP+ and SFP28.
- Networking in versus networking out of a server, and when it’s asymmetrical
- Software load balancing and networking
- The balance between network bandwidth into an organization versus bandwidth required across the organization
- Run up to 25GbE and possibly even 50GbE in the near future and how we get to 400GbE
- The role of PCI Express, speeds, and how we need PCIe Generation 4 to move beyond 25GbE to dual 50GbE cards
- How 25GbE can use the same cables as 10GbE so the hardware costs to move are easier, but the underlying technology becomes more challenging for the companies supplying it.
- New features found in NICs, like Solarflare’s X2 series, that includes security and high-performance packet filtering
- Solarflare ServerLock and how it contrasts to IPTables
- The difference between a hardware firewall appliance in-front of a server, and doing hardware filtering in the NIC
- How people can find Nick and his role at CC Integration, and what a technology integrator does
We then wrap up our chat with how this discussion ended up as a podcast.