Daily Resources for Web Designers & Developers by Andy Sowards » programming

The Future of Networking on 10 Gigabit Ethernet

Brian Johnson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:34:20 +0000

Intelligence In Software: IT Software Strategy

The Future of Networking on 10 Gigabit Ethernet

The rise of cloud computing is a bit like that of a space shuttle taking off: When the rocket engine and its propellants fire up, the shuttle lifts slowly off the launch pad and then builds momentum until it streaks into space.

Cloud is now in the momentum-building phase and on the verge of quickly soaring to new heights. There are lots of good reasons for the rapid rise of this new approach to computing. Cloud models are widely seen as one of the keys to increasing IT and business agility, making better use of infrastructure and cutting costs.

So how do you launch your cloud? An essential first step is to prepare your network for the unique requirements of services running on a multitenant shared infrastructure. These requirements include IT simplicity, scalability, interoperability and manageability. All of these requirements make the case for unified networking based on 10 gigabit Ethernet (10GbE).

Unified networking over 10GbE simplifies your network environment. It allows you to unite your network into one type of fabric so you don’t have to maintain and manage different technologies for different types of network traffic. You also gain the ability to run storage traffic over a dedicated SAN if that makes the most sense for your organization.

Either way, 10GbE gives you a great deal of scalability, enabling you to quickly scale up your networking bandwidth to keep pace with the dynamic demands of cloud applications. This rapid scalability helps you avoid I/O bottlenecks and meet your service-level agreements.

While that’s all part of the goodness of 10GbE, it’s important to keep this caveat in mind: Not all 10GbE is the same. You need a solution that scales and, with features like intelligent offloads of targeted processing functions, helps you realize best-in-class performance for your cloud network. Unified networking solutions can be enabled through a combination of standard Intel Ethernet products along with trusted network protocols integrated and enabled in a broad range of operating systems and hypervisors. This approach makes unified networking capabilities available on every server, enabling maximum reuse in heterogeneous environments. Ultimately, this approach to unified networking helps you solve today’s overarching cloud networking challenges and create a launch pad for your private, hybrid or public cloud.

The urge to purge: Have you had enough of “too many” and “too much”?

In today’s data center, networks are a story of “too many” and “too much.” That’s too many fabrics, too many cables, and too much complexity. Unified networking simplifies this story. “Too many” and “too much” become “just right.” Let’s start with the fabrics. It’s not uncommon to find an organization that is running three distinctly different networks: a 1GbE management network, a multi-1GbE local area network (LAN), and a Fibre Channel or iSCSI storage area network (SAN).

Unified networking enables cost-effective connectivity to the LAN and the SAN on the same Ethernet fabric. Pick your protocols for your storage traffic. You can use NFS, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) to carry storage traffic over your converged Ethernet network.

You can still have a dedicated network for storage traffic if that works best for your needs. The only difference: That network runs your storage protocols over 10GbE — the same technology used in your LAN.

When you make this fundamental shift, you can reduce your equipment needs. Convergence of network fabrics allows you to standardize the equipment you use throughout your networking environment — the same cabling, the same NICs, the same switches. You now need just one set of everything, instead of two or three sets.

In a complementary gain, convergence over 10GbE helps you cut your cable numbers. In a 1GbE world, many virtualized servers have eight to 10 ports, each of which has its own network cable. In a typical deployment, one 10GbE cable could handle all of that traffic. This isn’t a vision of things to come. This world of simplified networking is here today. Better still, this is a world based on open standards. This approach to unified networking increases interoperability with common APIs and open-standard technologies. A few examples of these technologies:

Data Center Bridging (DCB) allows multiple types of traffic to run over an Ethernet wire.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) enables the Fibre Channel protocol used in many SANs to run over the Ethernet standard common in LANs.
Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) and Network Controller Sideband Interface (NC-SI) enable server management via the network.

These and other open-standard technologies enable the interoperability that allows network convergence and management simplification. And just like that, “too many” and “too much” become “just right.”

Know your limits — then push them with super-elastic 10GbE

Let’s imagine for a moment a dream highway. In the middle of the night, when traffic is light, the highway is a four-lane road. When the morning rush hour begins and cars flood the road, the highway magically adds several lanes to accommodate the influx of traffic.

This commuter’s dream is the way cloud networks must work. The cloud network must be architected to quickly scale up and down to adapt itself to the dynamic and unpredictable demands of applications. This super-elasticity is a fundamental requirement for a successful cloud.

Of course, achieving this level of elasticity is easier said than done. In a cloud environment, virtualization turns a single physical server into multiple virtual machines, each with its own dynamic I/O bandwidth demands. These dynamic and unpredictable demands can overwhelm networks and lead to unacceptable I/O bottlenecks. The solution to this challenge lies in super-elastic 10 GbE networks built for cloud traffic. So what does it take to get there? The right solutions help you build your 10 GbE network with unique technologies designed to accelerate virtualization and remove I/O bottlenecks, while complementing solutions from leading cloud software providers.

Consider these examples:

The latest Ethernet servers support Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), a standard created by the PCI Special Interest Group. SR-IOV improves network performance for Citrix XenServer and Red Hat KVM by providing dedicated I/O and data isolation between VMs and the network controller. The technology allows you to partition a physical port into multiple virtual I/O ports, each dedicated to a particular virtual machine.
Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDq) improves network performance and CPU utilization for VMware and Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V by reducing the sorting overhead of networking traffic. VMDq offloads data-packet sorting from the virtual switch in the virtual machine monitor and instead does this on the network adaptor. This innovation helps you avoid the I/O tax that comes with virtualization.

Technologies like these enable you to build a high-performing, elastic network that helps keep the bottlenecks out of your cloud. It’s like that dream highway that adds lanes whenever the traffic gets heavy.

Manage the ups, downs, and in-betweens of services in the cloud

In an apartment building, different tenants have different Internet requirements. Tenants who transfer a lot of large files or play online games want the fastest Internet connections they can get. Tenants who use the Internet only for email and occasional shopping are probably content to live with slower transfer speeds. To stay competitive, service providers need to tailor their offerings to these diverse needs.

This is the way it is in a cloud environment: Different tenants have different service requirements. Some need a lot of bandwidth and the fastest possible throughput times. Others can settle for something less.

If you’re operating a cloud environment, either public or private, you need to meet these differing requirements. That means you need to be able to allocate the right level of bandwidth to an application and manage network quality of service (QoS) in a manner that meets your service-level agreements (SLAs) with different tenants — technologies that allow you to tailor service quality to the needs and SLAs of different applications and different cloud tenants.

Here are some of the more important technologies for a well-managed cloud network: Data Center Bridging (DCB) provides a collection of standards-based end-to-end networking technologies that make Ethernet the unified fabric for multiple types of traffic in the data center.

It enables better traffic prioritization over a single interface, as well as an advanced means of shaping traffic on the network to decrease congestion.
Queue Rate Limiting (QRL) assigns a queue to each virtual machine (VM) or each tenant in the cloud environment and controls the amount of bandwidth delivered to that user. The Intel approach to QRL enables a VM or tenant to get a minimum amount of bandwidth, but it doesn’t limit the maximum bandwidth. If there is headroom on the wire, the VM or tenant can use it.
Traffic Steering sorts traffic per tenant to support rate limiting, QoS and other management approaches. Traffic Steering is made possible by on-chip flow classification that delineates one tenant from another. This is like the logic in the local Internet provider’s box in the apartment building. Everybody’s Internet traffic comes to the apartment in a single pipe, but then gets divided out to each apartment, so all the packets are delivered to the right addresses.

Technologies like these enable your organization to manage the ups, downs, and in-betweens of services in the cloud. You can then tailor your cloud offerings to the needs of different internal or external customers — and deliver the right level of service at the right price.

On the road to the cloud

For years, people have talked about 10 GbE being the future of networking and the foundation of cloud environments. Well, the future is now; 10GbE is here in a big way.

There are many reasons for this fundamental shift. Unified networking based on 10GbE helps you reduce the complexity of your network environment, increase I/O scalability and better manage network quality of service. 10GbE simplifies your network, allowing you to converge to one type of fabric. This is a story of simplification. One network card. One network connection. Optimum LAN and SAN performance. Put it all together and you have a solution for your journey to a unified, cloud-ready network.

To learn more about cloud unified networking, see this resource from our sponsor: Cloud Usage Models.

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Top 5 Responsive Website Designs on the Web

Jules — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 05:06:47 +0000

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Responsive Web Design is one of the most talked about trends in Web Design today, and will continue to remain a hot topic for as long as Smartphones and Tablets continue their domination in the handheld device industry. Research shows that the percentage of users accessing the internet through a handheld device is increasing exponentially, so if you haven’t considered the use of responsive design in your projects, it might be a good time to start exploring the techniques behind it.

Responsive Web Design is a term first coined by Ethan Marcotte, which went viral after a blog post on A List Apart back in 2010. Essentially, responsive web design refers to a websites ability to respond to the browser size in which it is viewed to enhance a users experience and ensure maximum exposure for the content itself. This will mean that the text is legible without having to zoom in and images are resized contextually allowing them to fit the browser screen without the need to scroll horizontally. Many design elements become invisible or hidden when viewed on a smaller browser size, which allows the user to get access to what they visited for the content itself.

In a sense, responsive web design is reminiscent of the old ‘text-based’ websites that we used to see of yesteryear, which primarily used to accommodate users on dial-up modems and slower internet connections to ensure faster page loading times. These days, whilst a responsive design does focus on the content, it also allows for some design elements to be incorporated to ensure consistency across all browsers which is essential for any brand strategy.

Responsive web design is still in its infancy however, and as with any new design technology, it takes time to be assimilated by the design world as a whole. For the Designer, it’s still very much a playground of trialling and testing new techniques – as the full potential of responsive web design is as yet uncharted.

Many designers have embraced the challenge and possibilities that responsive design presents and you should too! Below are my Top 5 Responsive Web Designs for your viewing pleasure and inspiration…

1. Forefathers Group

2. Sasquatch Music Festival

3. Ben Handzo Photography

4. Illy Issimo

5. Deren Keskin

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10 Simple & Best WordPress Contact Form Plugins For Your Blog

Leif — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:21:50 +0000

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Trying to find a Word Press plugin that best suited for your needs can be a bit of a hassle sometimes. Having a contact form is very important for your blog, which allows your visitors or advertisers to get in touch with you. But it’s very important to keep it simple and user friendly along with creative look involved.

WordPress is one such great platform that will allow you use simple plugins and get the contact form in minutes. We tried to list 10 best of those plugins here to save you time and frustration!

1. Contact Form 7

2. Contact Form By Contact Me.com

3. Fast Secure Contact Form

4. Simple Model Contact Form

5. A Capture Contact Form

6. 123 Contact Form For WordPress

7. Cool Contact Form

8. Tiny Contact Form

9. Slick Contact Form

10. Visitors Contact Form

Do you have a favorite Contact Form Plugin that we missed? Share it below in the comments and help the community!!

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How To Lower The Impact of Google Panda – 5 Tips For Search Traffic Recovery

HTMLFirm — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:43:48 +0000

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When it comes to the online world and the norms attached to it, Google Panda penalty is one of the most talked about things. In fact, the recent few months have shown a lot of iteration in Panda. Panda was released in Feb 2011 and ever since then many websites have experienced a slowdown in the traffic volume. Most of the websites ignored Panda considering it just another new thing. But that is exactly what made the situation complex for them. But websites can not really afford to lose traffic.

Panda Image via Shutterstock

What needs to be realized by website owners is that if they want to recover from Panda penalty, it is imperative to put plans on hold and start taking action right away. What needs to be done first is to figure out why Google panda updates are affecting your website. And in what way it is affecting your website? If you find out that your website traffic is going down after every update then you should plan a good SEO strategy without any delay.

Before proceeding any further, let us see what exactly Google Panda penalty is. Google Panda actually is a big tweak in the search engine algorithm. The main purpose of this penalty is to push up the standard and good quality websites and lower down the bad quality site content. Very different from other updates, Google Panda is actually a domain level penalty. What this means is that even if a website has 10 good quality pages then too its ranking can get hurt. However, fortunately there is a way out. In order to check Google Panda penalty, it is always best to check Google Analytics for the dates for any traffic rise or drop.

There is a drop in traffic in some cases while in other cases there is an increase. If your website has experienced a drop in traffic, then your website certainly lacks in something. Another possibility is that you might be having certain aspects that made Google push you site down in terms of quality and reliability. Now what you need to do here is- find out what exactly the reason is. The problem could be anything like poor quality content, improper SEO, load time or even the design as well. Read further and you will find out on what major aspects should you focus in order to lower down the impact of Google panda penalty on your website.

Site indexed pages

Index Image via Shutterstock

You need to have a clear idea about how Google indexes your website pages. You can go to Google.com and look for the site- domain.com. Now replace domain with your domain address. On doing this you will find all the pages of your site that are indexed in Google. Now you need to analyze which pages are indexed. Moreover, you must ensure that none of your tags, labels, categories or any other part which does not hold any value is indexed. You should then go to the last page. If it says ‘show omitted results’ then click on it and check if your website’s pages are indexed with parameters like replytocom or iSalt etc.

Now if you are fed up of URL parameters and other useless link which is getting indexed in Google because of non-canonical tag, then you should use .htaccess code for clean WordPress URL.

User behavior

Behavior Image via Shutterstock

You must remember that user behavior is one of the most important factors for search engine ranking. Everything from bounce rate to time on site play an important role. One of the reasons for bounce rate could be the too cluttered look of your website. And if page views/visit is low then you need to work hard on your site’s content and design. Visitors might be abandoning your website because of poor or irrelevant information, too many ads, slow load time etc. Your aim should be to improve the bounce rate and increase the number of page views/visits.

Poor quality content

Quality Image via Shutterstock

Most of the times, website owners add posts and content without giving a thought to its relevancy. This certainly invites trouble and can bring Google panda penalty. To get an idea about the quality of content you should have, go to Google.com and search for ‘SEO optimized content’. Now go through the first five results. Analyze them and rate all the pages on the scale of ten. Then try to figure out why you rated a page higher than the other. Although all five pages have the quality content but there will be certain aspects in each of them that would make you rate them all differently. If you are able to find an answer to this, you are going in the right direction. When you find out the thin content on your site then you should re-edit the posts, now index them and then remove them from Google search.

Too many advertisements

Tokyo Image via Shutterstock

It is not possible to operate a website without any advertisements. Even Google never asks you to have no ads. But problem occurs when a site has too many ads. Moreover, what complicates the matter even more is the addition of ads in a manner that give a cluttered look to the site. This will certainly bring trouble for your website. You are even more prone to inviting panda penalty if you add ads in between the posts. Hence you should avoid doing this. Do not include too many ads and do not keep them around your content.

Site SEO

SEO Image via Shutterstock

Many people think that panda means death of SEO. However, this is not true. Fact is that Panda enhances the algorithm and makes Google search even better. You should only make use of safe SEO practices. Make use of Sitemap, backlink building, Canonical URLs etc. also pay attention to your on page SEO. If you have not done the SEO of your website, then you are missing out on too much like quality traffic and better rankings. You also need to pay attention to factors like Page speed, poor backlinks etc. to get a perfect idea about your website’s weaknesses, let a layman browse your site and ask for the opinion. If the person faces any problem, you will be able to find out the specific area your website lacks on.

Besides this, you should always search in Google for the topic you are writing on. You should properly analyze the content of first 5-6 results. This will give you a clear idea about what all you need to focus on while writing. In a nutshell, you should write quality and detailed posts, regularly update your site, do social bookmarking, have a clutter free layout, use Breadcrumbs and make use of sites like YouTube to drive more traffic.
By doing all the above mentioned things, you can certainly recover from the panda penalty and can once again start receiving better and targeted traffic. Just make sure that you do the right things in a right manner.

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10 Free WordPress Themes for Creative Professional Work Portfolios

Amanda Tradwick — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:59:40 +0000

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Whether you are a photographer, a designer, or an artist, you will need a Web design that shows off large, beautiful pictures of your work. If you are looking for a simple WordPress theme, there are several free themes that are suitable for creative work. Here are 10 of the best free themes:

Grace

This minimalist and muted photo theme puts your photos on display. There is a rotating banner of featured photos, and a featured mini gallery of recent photos. You can add widgets and set options for customization.

Fotofolio

This Jquery integrated theme allows you to choose featured photographs, customize the appearance, and add blog posts or news articles. It is a simple, understated design that highlights your work.

Autofocus

Photos of your work can cover the whole front page of your site with this theme. You can set your own options for different layout styles, each with an emphasis on photos of your work. You can also set it to integrate photos from your Flickr account.

Snapshot

You can choose between two different theme layouts and three different color schemes with this minimalist theme. It has built-in SEO options and the ability to customize headers, sidebars, and more.

Revolt

This funky design allows you to customize the header with your own message and photo. The body of the layout features your creations and your blog posts. The theme is packaged with plug-ins and comes with support. You can also be featured in the community forums for using the theme.

Video

If videos are what you need to feature, then this aptly named theme is perfect. You can select featured videos for a slideshow, then showcase thumbnails of your video gallery. The front page is completely customizable, and the theme includes support.

Modern

This minimalist design uses a grid-based design with a sidebar, putting all the emphasis on your photos and your work. The theme includes video instructions for easy customization.

Suburbia

This magazine-style layout includes logo customization, threaded comments support, and built-in SEO features.

Viewport

Sliding panels display recent works and posts on this clean theme. Video and various photo formats are supported.

BizzFolio

This theme features a levitating Jquery slider to showcase recent works. It includes the ability to customize the homepage and “about” page, and there are 5 custom CSS styles.

Of course, no WordPress theme can ever truly offer all the features you need to create your own unique blog to reflect your own personal style. Hiring a Web designer like Andy Sowards can ensure that you get a Web design (even a theme) that is customized especially for you.