Networking, networking, networking, networking!

There’s a funny, infamous video someone put together on YouTube years ago showing a highly enthusiastic Steve Balmer (to put it mildly) strutting on stage shouting “Developers, developers, developers, developers!” over and over again.  Much of this footage presumably came from speeches given by Steve at conferences, talking about how important developers were to his company’s future.  I imagine that if that video was being remade today, the shouting would be “Networking, networking, networking, networking!”

If you’ve ever had to stand up your own OpenStack cloud, whether for eduction, R&D or production purposes,  you know how much time and effort goes into networking tasks; it’s daunting!  Configuring link aggregation, physical networks, provider networks, tenant networks, etc., requires careful planning and meticulous attention to detail.  Throw in on top of that abstractions like VLANs, VXLANs, virtual routers, etc., and the complexity seemingly grows exponentially.  Once you’ve got everything set-up, there’s probably about a 100% chance you’ve made an error somewhere (at least that’s my experience).  If you expect OpenStack to tell you exactly where you went wrong, and point out your problem, think again!  “Vanilla” OpenStack can be unforgiving.

As the industry’s leading provider of embedded networking technologies (both on this planet and Mars), Wind River understands what it takes to get networking done right.  Our Wind River Titanium Cloud network virtualization platform add tools, visualization aids and automatic network connectivity audits to OpenStack to ease the network configuration and troubleshooting burden.

One senior network engineer that I recently met with told me that he thinks he spends 90% of his time on networking issues when bringing up new systems.  He was really excited to be using the new tools in the latest release of Titanium Server which he believes saves him hours of work, and reduced frustration, through more rapid networking configuration.  He’s not quite jumping around shouting about networking, but he is clearly very pleased.

Today’s production clouds can span hundreds of servers and of virtual machines, together with all the physical and virtual networking required to support them.

Titanium Cloud’s tools and features which tackle this complexity head on can yield thousands of dollars in annual OpEx savings; that’s real money better spent on revenue generating activities.

To learn more about Titanium Clous, it’s rich feature set and Carrier Grade reliability, contact us at www.windriver.com.  We’re excited with what we’ve built and we’re eager to share!