Jim Duffy, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Jim Duffy

Author Archives: Jim Duffy

Cisco indirect infringement case against Arista dismissed

A federal judge dismissed Cisco’s indirect infringement claims against Arista Networks, a complaint that accompanied a patent and copyright infringement case against its data center rival.The patent and infringement litigation, filed late last year, still stands and is proceeding.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Suing Arista was always the plan+According to Courthouse News Service, U.S. Federal Judge Beth Labson Freeman earlier this month dismissed the pre-suit indirect infringement claims since Cisco conceded that it is not seeking damages for those claims.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enterprise disaggregation is inevitable

Back in March, the issue was raised whether disaggregation – decoupling network software from hardware for lower cost, choice and flexibility – could play in the enterprise as well as the service provider realm.The answer, judging by recent events, is that it can. But currently to a lesser extent than it does with service providers, who will still reap most of the benefits of initial enterprise deployments.Announcements by Pica8, Ciena and AT&T that they plan to offer bare metal and white box switches, and virtual network functions as customer premises equipment, do signal that enterprises are indeed a target for disaggregation. But penetration is currently limited to that – CPE supplied and managed by service providers for the purpose of connecting that enterprise to its service network.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Here comes bare metal and NFV for the enterprise

Two hardware vendors this week unveiled products to bring commodity switching and network functions virtualization (NFV) to enterprises through service providers.Bare metal switch supplier Pica8 this week rolled out a Power-over-Ethernet switches to be sold into enterprises by service providers as managed service customer premises equipment (CPE). And Ciena announced availability of the 3938vi Service Virtualization Switch, an Ethernet CPE platform with virtualized network function (VNF) integration. Pica8 The offerings address a desire by service providers, like AT&T, to sell bare metal white box switches into the customer premises for cost, flexibility, performance and SDN programmability advantages, and to offer service as VNFs on that hardware. Pica8 says this market – bare metal as CPE – is six months old and that this week’s PoE offerings are merely the latest in an existing CPE portfolio to onboard enterprises to the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Enterprises hesitant on SDNs

SANTA CLARA -- Even though service providers are well on their way with SDNs, enterprise adoption of the technology is slowed by a host of issues. Chief among them is cultural inertia. Large enterprises in particular are loathe to change anything, be it technology, operational processes or organizational structure, especially if the need to do so is unclear or viewed as potentially risky.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NSA uses OpenFlow for tracking… its network

SANTA CLARA -- Just as the industry is becoming more comfortable with SDNs, the NSA says it’s using them too.The embattled National Security Agency, which has been surreptitiously collecting phone records on all of us for many years as part of a secret surveillance operation, is implementing an OpenFlow SDN for its own internal operations. No mention was made whether an OpenFlow SDN also supports the agency’s surveillance operations – it’s doubtful the NSA would open up on the underpinnings of its spy network.But internally, the agency faces the same issues any large enterprise IT shop faces: do more, faster and at less cost with fewer people. And with a lot of oversight.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Google opens up on its SDN

At this week’s Open Network Summit, Google spoke for the first time publicly about its custom data center network. For nearly a decade, we’ve been hearing, reading and writing about how Google was building its own switches and writing its own software to handle the tremendous traffic load on its search engine and applications because vendor offerings were either not up to the task, too expensive, or both.This week we found out how they did it. In a keynote presentation at ONS, Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow and Technical Lead for Networking, described the company’s data center network architecture, capabilities and capacity for a rapt audience thirsting for information on software-defined networking implementations and experiences.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft needs SDN for Azure cloud

SANTA CLARA – Microsoft’s Azure couldn’t scale without SDN.The Microsoft cloud, through which the company’s software products are delivered, has 22 hyper-scale regions around the world. Azure storage and compute usage is doubling every six months, and Azure lines up 90,000 new subscribers a month.Fifty-seven percent of the Fortune 500 use Azure and the number of hosts quickly grew from 100,000 to millions, said CTO Mark Russinovich during his Open Network Summit keynote address here this week. Azure needs a virtualized, partitioned and scale-out design, delivered through software, in order to keep up with that kind of growth.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

AT&T looking at white boxes as CPE

SANTA CLARA -- AT&T is considering offering bare metal switches and servers to consumers as customer premises equipment for the carrier’s services. At the Open Network Summit conference here, Andre Fuetsch, AT&T senior vice president, Architecture & Design, said the economics of commodity bare metal switching, as well as the scale, performance and programmability, make it appealing for the carrier to sell into the customer premises. +MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: AT&T lays out 'radical' network changes with SDN+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell adds Pluribus, brings Linux-based OS to its data center switches

Dell has added Pluribus Networks to its lineup of disaggregation partners.Dell will now offer Pluribus’ Open Netvisor Linux operating system on its S6000-ON and S-4048-ON 10G/40G switches. This is an addition to the Cumulus Networks, Big Switch Networks, Midokura and VMware packages Dell already supports on those switches.Dell’s strategy is to make its merchant silicon-based hardware appealing to cloud providers who usually opt for bare metal switches running a variety of operating systems that they can easily replace or expand for scale or other requirements.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell adds Pluribus, brings Linux-based OS to its data center switches

Cisco vet to head SDN start-up

SDN start-up PLUMgrid has named a former Cisco veteran as its new CEO.Larry Lang, who left Cisco in 2009 after a 16-year career, is PLUMgrid’s new CEO. He replaces founder Awais Nemat, who has been appointed chairman of the board of directors.Lang held various positions in enterprise and service provider management and marketing at Cisco. His last role there was vice president and general manager of the company’s Services and Mobility business unit, responsible for Cisco’s mobile Internet strategy.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

No GA yet for Cisco’s enterprise SDN

Cisco’s enterprise SDN controller is still in controlled release a year after it was first supposed to be generally available and months after an updated GA date. The APIC Enterprise Module shipped in February in controlled release to “multiple” customers who are using it in production, Cisco says, including IBM, which is using it on behalf of German airliner Lufthansa.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco boosts cloud software, lines up ISVs to write Internet of Everything services

SAN DIEGO -- Cisco this week enhanced its cloud software and lined up a roster of ISVs to create services for the company’s Internet of Everything initiative.Cisco added security, management and support for more hypervisors to its Intercloud Fabric software, an application that connects private, public and hybrid clouds together for workload mobility. Cisco also enlisted 35 software developers – including Citrix, F5, Cloudera, Hortonworks and Chef -- to build services for the Intercloud and offer them through an Intercloud Marketplace.Areas ISVs will target include development platforms for production applications, containers and community-based open source programs; big data and analytics; and IoE cloud services, such as network control, performance, security, data virtualization, energy management, and business services like collaboration and consistent portals from Cisco’s Services Exchange Platform.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Outgoing Cisco CEO Chambers fesses up to mistakes, touts company’s grit

SAN DIEGO – Reflecting on a two-decade tenure as Cisco CEO marked by enviable success, John Chambers says he wishes the company could have moved faster. “Mistakes that I’ve made [have been] when I haven’t moved fast enough” into new market opportunities, Cisco’s outgoing CEO said to a room full of reporters during an open-ended question-and-answer session at the Cisco Live conference in San Diego. “Or I moved too fast without process behind it.” It was perhaps Chambers’ last meeting with the press as CEO given that he will step down in late July. Incoming CEO Chuck Robbins shared the stage and fielded questions along Chambers. (See How Chambers kept a high profile.)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco has an SDN for you

SAN DIEGO -- Cisco is out to prove it has an SDN for everyone.At its Cisco Live conference, the company unveiled offerings to drive programmability across its product line to address the requirements of enterprises, service providers and mega-scale data centers.The additions are to Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) EVPN and NX-OS programmable network options. ACI is targeted at the mass market – commercial, enterprise and public sector customers – while BGP EVPN is aimed at service providers and programmable NX-OS at mega-scale data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco has an SDN for you

Cisco plans to embed security everywhere

SAN DIEGO -- Cisco this week announced a plan to embed security throughout the network – from the data center out to endpoints, branch offices, and the cloud – in an effort to avoid pervasive threats.Cisco says the strategy, announced at this week’s Cisco Live conference, will give customers the ability to gain threat-centric security required for the digitized business and the Internet of Everything. The company sees IoE as a $19 trillion opportunity over the next decade while cybercrime is itself a $450 billion to $1 trillion business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco denies MPLS may leave

Cisco says reports that its star spin-in engineers – Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, aka “MPLS” – may leave the company this year are untrue. Speculation arose last week during Cisco’s top level management makeover that some or all of MPLS might leave after the departure of CEO John Chambers, and certain vesting and bonus milestones are reached in September.Cisco at first had no comment on the future of MPLS at Cisco while noting that incentives tied to their most recent spin-in, Insieme Networks, run through Cisco’s fiscal year 2017, which ends in July 2016. Once that response was published, Cisco followed up with a sterner denial in an e-mailed statement:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Cisco partners prepare for Cisco Live

With Cisco Live fast approaching, many third-party vendors who rely on Cisco and its installed base for their own business are announcing products before and at the show. Two are start-ups Glue Networks, a developer of SDN software for Cisco router WANs, and Avi Networks, a maker of application delivery controller software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

HP, Arista team to take on Cisco, IBM, EMC in converged infrastructure

HP has entered into an arrangement with Arista Networks to market Arista’s data center switches along with HP converged IT infrastructure products.In accounts where Arista is the preferred networking supplier, HP will offer the switches along with its Converged Architecture portfolio, which includes HP servers and storage, including HP 3PAR StoreServ flash storage and the HP OneView management system.Speculation has it that HP will also offer Arista’s EOS operating system on its merchant silicon-based switching hardware as part of a disaggregated offering similar to HP’s arrangement with Cumulus Networks. HP is offering Cumulus Linux as an operating system option on some new Accton-based branded white box switches, which through support of the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) can run various third-party operating systems.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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