Failure without Consequence with Jeff Raymond, Final Interview w/Doug Gourlay

For the final demo of the show, we have a look at the stateful process restart capabilities of the NX-OS operating system. Process modularity is one point of a modular operating system, but being able to statefully restart a process without a network reconvergence event is another league all-together. In this demo, we look at the impact of a spanning-tree process failure - which, ordinarily is a significant network event that effects all bridges in a L2 domain. However, with stateful process restart, we are able to recover the failed process without loosing any protocol state. The neighboring bridge does not even register a hiccup as the restart time happens so quickly.

This is one of the 'self-healing' aspects of the operating system. It adds yet another degree of availability to the other Operational Continuity features of the Nexus 7000 platform (Dual supervisors, stateful switchover, Grace restart, etc). For more information on the Operation continuity features, please read this white paper.