In my last post, I talked about the increasing use of enterprise Solid-State Drives (SSDs) and the many different requirements they must be tuned for based on data center application needs. The dilemma for the SSD makers is how to meet these disparate needs while still offering affordable solutions to end users. Supporting these disparate requirements that span cold storage to high-performance SSDs for database applications cost-effectively requires a well-planned, flexible silicon architecture that will allow for software defined solutions. These solutions need to support software optimizations based around (to name a few):
Different densities and over-provisioning NAND levels
Different types of NAND (SLC/MLC/TLC) at different nodes
Different power envelopes
Different amounts of DRAM
Often need to support Toggle and ONFI, in order to maintain flexibility of NAND use
Let’s take a deeper look at MPLS-TP OAM and the new extensions needed to OpenFlow as we pave the way to carrier grade SDNs. MPLS-TP has explicit requirements for fault monitoring and protection switching, while OpenFlow currently has no explicit support for fault monitoring or failure recovery.
Fault Monitoring
Fault monitoring is performed in the NNI to UNI direction. OAM packets will be extracted from the MPLS-TP traffic streams and redirected to monitoring entities at the appropriate level, e.g. section, LSP and PW. Fault monitoring with Y.1731 makes use of entities called RMEPs (Remote MEPs or Maintenance Endpoints). RMEPs monitor the ‘liveness’ of a connection between a MEP and its peer MEP by terminating and processing the continuity check messages (CCMs) being transmitted by the remote end.
PMC recently joined Canonical’s Ubuntu OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL), an integration lab where Canonical tests and validates software with multiple versions of Ubuntu OpenStack on different hardware configurations.
When you’re in the business of high-density, high-performance I/O connectivity like PMC is, OIL is an important place to be. Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system and Ubuntu OpenStack are the most popular operating platforms for cloud and scale-out computing. Ubuntu is the hyperscale OS natively powering scale-out workloads on a new wave of low-cost, ultra-dense server hardware based on x86, ARM, and OpenPower processors.
