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About Troy Whitney

Troy Whitney is a Technical Architect focused on design and architecture of advanced data center technologies including Virtualization, Computing, Network, Storage, and Orchestration/Automation. Prior to joining Ahead, Troy worked for six years at Cisco Systems - most recently as a Data Center Consulting Systems Engineer - and for five years at NASA Johnson Space Center as an Aircraft Avionics Engineer. Troy supports the Ahead office located in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

Posts by: Troy Whitney

What’s the “Big Deal” about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 Fabric?

December 23, 2011 | by Troy Whitney | Posted in Enterprise Servers, Networking | Tags: , |
What's the "big deal" about Cisco UCS ver 2.0 fabric?  Two words: bandwidth and flexibility. Cisco recently expanded the UCS product line to include an additional Fabric Interconnect (model 6248), an additional Chassis IO Module (model 2208), as well as software release 2.0 with many new features. The new 2.0 components support existing chassis and server blades, and are back-compatible to inter-operate with existing first-generation UCS hardware (in original modes of use.) Although the new models need not obsolete the original hardware, many of the recent Cisco UCS deployments by Ahead have opted to take advantage of the benefits of the new components. The new 6248 Fabric Interconnect packs 48 Unified Ports into a 1 RU form factor. Any of the base Unified Ports may be configured to ...

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OpenFlow Networking

September 8, 2011 | by Troy Whitney | Posted in Future, Networking |
Odds are that you've heard the buzz about OpenFlow. Lets take a quick look at what it is, how it works and a few benefits and challenges of the new technology. What It Is OpenFlow is a method to allow the traffic-forwarding behavior of an Ethernet switch to be controlled by an external software program. It was created by researchers at Stanford University (and others) to share physical networks between production use and experimental research use. The researchers needed a way to test new networking protocols at large scale without effecting normal user traffic. OpenFlow was developed to allow the production network to be carved into virtual segments - some segments for production use and other segments for experimental use. The production segments use traditional techniques to ...

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