IEEE Ethernet Specs Could Soothe Data Center Ills

alphadogg writes "Cisco, HP and others are waging an epic battle to gain more control of the data center, but at the same time they are joining forces to push through new Ethernet standards that could greatly ease management of those increasingly virtualized IT nerve centers. The IEEE 802.1Qbg and 802.1Qbh specifications are designed to address serious management issues raised by the explosion of virtual machines in data centers that traditionally have been the purview of physical servers and switches. In a nutshell, the emerging standards would offload significant amounts of policy, security and management processing from virtual switches on network interface cards (NIC) and blade servers and put it back onto physical Ethernet switches connecting storage and compute resources. 'There needed to be a way to communicate between the hypervisor and the network,' says Jon Oltsik, an analyst at Enterprise Systems Group. 'When you start thinking about the complexities associated with running dozens of VMs on a physical server the sophistication of data center switching has to be there.'"

Comments

Reasons for lack of HTTPS

[jolyonr]

In my experience this is down to

1. belief that nothing of significant importance is being transmitted via HTTP anyway.

2. complication/expense of setting up secure certificates. It's much cheaper than it used to be, but it's still quite complicated to install on your average server. Wildcard certificates are still a lot more expensive than they need to be (can anyone explain why these are so much more expensive - other than "because they can get away with charging that")

3. inability for HTTPS to work with shared IP addresses. This is probably the major factor, many websites run as vhosts on the same IP, which is great for reducing our 'IP4 footprint' but not very good for HTTPS.

4. Performance is obviously lower for HTTPS than HTTP, so for popular websites the hosting cost differences can be significant. Probably why google has put off shifting gmail to HTTPS for so long...

None of these are justifications for NOT using HTTPS, just the usual problems I come up with when trying to persuade clients to switch to HTTPS.

Jolyon