Summary: The final presentation from Networking Field Day 17 was unique: <a target="_blank" href="http://techfieldday.com/appearance/mellanox-technologies-presents-with-ixia-and-cumulus-networks-at-networking-field-day-17/" rel="noopener">Mellanox, Ixia, and Cumulus</a> shared the presentation slot to talk about their individual merits as well as how they work together.<br> Mellanox<br> Mellanox builds Ethernet and storage switches for a variety of use cases. The company touted its custom silicon as a differentiator, as well as the fact that you can run Mellanox using its own network OS, or load a variety of third-party NOSs (hint: Cumulus is one of them).<br> After a brief tour through its Ethernet product line, Mellanox made the case for a Clos/leaf-spine configuration as the ideal design for a data center network, and EVPN VXLAN as the ideal fabric for that design.<br> Ixia<br> Next up, Ixia presented on its flagship IxNetwork testing suite and how it can be used to validate the performance, scalability, and efficiency of a data center network.<br> The company followed with a demonstration of a test of a data center network built from Mellanox switches running the Cumulus NOS and using a VXLAN fabric.<br> Cumulus Networks<br> Last but not least, Cumulus presented on its Cumulus Linux network OS and how it works on whitebox switches. Cumulus touted the advantages of a Linux core, including the ability to manage the software using common tools such as Puppet and Chef.<br> For those not conversant with Linux, Cumulus also shared details about its Network Command Line Utility (NCLU), a CLI that network operators will find familiar.<br> The presentation also demonstrated some of the capabilities of Cumulus NetQ, a telemetry system that collects state information from NetQ agents running on Cumulus and other Linux OSs, bare metal hosts, and VMs, and then sends that state information to a database that engineers can query.<br> Using NetQ, engineers can validate network state, test configuration changes in a virtual lab, and diagnose problems.<br>
