Dell moves the needle in data center networking

Dell is doing some great work in Data center networking area ever since they acquired Force10 (http://www.force10networks.com/). Recently Dell announced DFM (Data Center Fabric Manager) which shows company vision towards Data center networking and most importantly  towards SDN (Software Defined Networks).

Dell is capitalizing on some of the major challenges which we face while designing & Maintaining Data Center network. Let's take a look at some of those.

• Designing Core Network :- Takes huge amount of time to design Data center core network and i am sure you must have spent weeks and weeks in front of Visio & Excel.
• Maintaining similar Software on switches :- Depending on the size of organization you may be maintaining 100s of switches worldwide or may be in certain areas. Have you checked if they are updated and running latest binaries. well and answer is , we know to some extent.
• Knowledge Transfer :- What if your network admin decides to move on you are left with Built/Architecture documents which are mostly not updated. Yes this is known fact , look at your document repository and see when was the last time it was updated :)
• Lots of Typing :- If you have to configure 100 switches with same CLI commands , you may create a script or find some other way but there are no standard way to enable all network engineers/administrator to follow same standards while configuring switches. if you have to validate Layer 3 configuration on these switches, you again need to spend week or may be more than a week. 
• Cabling Information :- How many times you have asked for help to trace the cable, I know almost every time :). I have seen people maintaining excel sheets to maintain cabling information. If cable dressing was properly done , you still need to look into the excel sheet and find our what is connecting where. We have traced some servers in DC using MAC address and i can tell you from my experience although it was easy but u need to logon to multiple switches to trace it.

Answer to all above challenges from Dell is http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/dell-fabric-manager/pd

Having said all above, i see a great value from Dell to customer in helping them with tool based approach to not only design the network but to maintain it. Dell has got very limited information on this overall solution offerings and therefore i am still not sure if its going to work with Cisco/Juniper/HP Network stacks or just with Dell Force10. 

I hope Dell has bigger plans in Network space and they would like to provide unique solution in new era of networking which will be driven by software.

Software define Networking is going to be the future and i will write a separate post on this topic.

Cheers!!

Pankaj