ALLEN, TX -- Nokia’s $16.6 billion acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent is an example of the industry shifting just as Cisco predicted, its CEO said this week.Cisco CEO John Chambers has said that the IT industry in in for some “brutal” consolidation with perhaps only two or three of the top five companies standing in five years. Alcatel-Lucent may be vanishing if Nokia’s offer to swallow the company up is approved.“The market is playing out just as we expected,” Chambers said during an exclusive interview with Network World at Cisco IT Data Center Day here. “It’s going to be brutal, with some musical chairs. They missed market transitions so now they have to move rapidly.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco has invested in MobiKwik, an Indian “mobile wallet” company that offers payment for goods and services from a consumer’s desktop or mobile device. Cisco has taken an undisclosed minority stake in the company’s $30 million Series B round.The investment was led by Cisco’s India corporate development team. The lead investor was Tree Line Asia, and American Express and existing investor Sequoia Capital also helped fund the round.The funds will support user and personnel growth, expanding its merchant network, marketing and investments in data analytics. MobiKwik currently has over 15 million users and 25,000 merchants.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade this week unveiled a campus switch and other enhancements to better support video and wireless traffic, improve management and extend software defined networking.
The new switch is the ICX 7250. It supports up to eight 10G Ethernet ports for uplinks or stacking, and can be stacked 12-high into a virtual chassis supporting 576 Gigabit Ethernet and 96 10G ports.
Brocade says this density will enable campus networks to better support bandwidth-intensive video and wireless traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade this week unveiled a campus switch and other enhancements to better support video and wireless traffic, improve management and extend software defined networking.
The new switch is the ICX 7250. It supports up to eight 10G Ethernet ports for uplinks or stacking, and can be stacked 12-high into a virtual chassis supporting 576 Gigabit Ethernet and 96 10G ports.
Brocade says this density will enable campus networks to better support bandwidth-intensive video and wireless traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade this week unveiled a campus switch and other enhancements to better support video and wireless traffic, improve management and extend software defined networking.
The new switch is the ICX 7250. It supports up to eight 10G Ethernet ports for uplinks or stacking, and can be stacked 12-high into a virtual chassis supporting 576 Gigabit Ethernet and 96 10G ports.
Brocade says this density will enable campus networks to better support bandwidth-intensive video and wireless traffic.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Juniper Networks and VMware have downgraded their participation in the OpenDaylight Project, an effort develop an open source SDN framework. Both are now Silver members with much lower financial and personnel commitments.Juniper was a founding, top tier Platinum member, committing $500,000 and 10 staffers to the project. VMware was a Gold member, committing $250,000 and three engineers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Arista Networks this week decoupled the pricing of its software and switch hardware as a consumption option for cloud providers.Arista is offering its EOS operating system as a separate subscription-based license from its switch hardware. The hardware is priced under a separate bundle but its purchase requires an EOS subscription.Essentially what Arista has done is priced its hardware and software separately and offered EOS as a subscription-based license vs. a perpetual license. It’s a new consumption model for Arista kit that the vendor says is more aligned with the way cloud providers purchase and operate the products.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Network management is a sticky issue when it comes to implementing software-defined networks and network virtualization.Lack of visibility into the underlying infrastructure has been cited by vendors and consultants as an inhibitor of SDN adoption. Traditional tools were designed for legacy networks, not the software overlay abstraction that SDN critics say shields operators from network behavior and anomalies.But with the release of more SDN controllers and applications comes the emergence of tools to manage the virtualized network. Two of the more popular SDN management tools are TAP monitoring applications and network packet brokers (NPB), which negotiate network traffic from multiple SPAN ports and manipulate it to allow more efficient use of monitoring devices like TAPs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Network management is a sticky issue when it comes to implementing software-defined networks and network virtualization.Lack of visibility into the underlying infrastructure has been cited by vendors and consultants as an inhibitor of SDN adoption. Traditional tools were designed for legacy networks, not the software overlay abstraction that SDN critics say shields operators from network behavior and anomalies.But with the release of more SDN controllers and applications comes the emergence of tools to manage the virtualized network. Two of the more popular SDN management tools are TAP monitoring applications and network packet brokers (NPB), which negotiate network traffic from multiple SPAN ports and manipulate it to allow more efficient use of monitoring devices like TAPs.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco recently unveiled three enhancements to its core and edge platforms for service providers to increase programmability for cloud and IP traffic growth. The new offerings include Application Engineered Routing, the IOS XRv 9000 Virtual Router and 100G Ethernet line cards for the ASR 9000 series edge router.The new and enhanced products are intended to allow service providers to scale their networks and to uncover new revenue opportunities. Cisco says global IP traffic will increase three-fold from 2013 to 2018, a compound annual growth rate of 21%, due to more Internet users and devices, faster broadband speeds and more video viewing.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A group of big name vendors including Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Broadcom, Juniper and Arista Networks this week created a consortium to address switch faceplate bandwidth density and airflow constraints caused by increasing networking speeds.The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) is promoting collaboration in defining industry standards that permit relocating the optical module from the faceplate to inside the networking equipment where economic and environmental benefits can be achieved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A group of big name vendors including Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, Intel, Broadcom, Juniper and Arista Networks this week created a consortium to address switch faceplate bandwidth density and airflow constraints caused by increasing networking speeds.The Consortium for On-Board Optics (COBO) is promoting collaboration in defining industry standards that permit relocating the optical module from the faceplate to inside the networking equipment where economic and environmental benefits can be achieved.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Stoke the rumor fires once again. Bernstein Research has issued a note this week that states storage giant EMC is prepared to buy, and that Arista Networks and Brocade might make good fits.Arista, for one, combined with EMC’s VMware possession and go-to-market capability would create an alternative to Cisco “stronger than anything present in the market today,” the note states.The report’s authors say the catalyst for the EMC buying speculation were remarks by CEO Joe Tucci at a recent analyst meeting that “consolidation opportunities” existed for EMC that were instantly accretive. They say EMC could do up to a $10 billion+ cash deal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco Systems has replaced its top computing executive.Paul Perez, vice president and general manager, Computing Systems at Cisco, left the company this month for undisclosed reasons. He is being replaced by Satinder Sethi, vice president of UCS Product Management & Solutions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After last week’s Innovation Day announcements, Juniper Networks has a range of SDN, data center fabric and data center switching products to choose from.Does it have too many? The addition of the new QFX10000 spine switch and Junos Fusion fabric may mean some product rationalization is in the works.“There is some level of complexity in product positioning,” acknowledges Juniper CEO Rami Rahim. “But if customers decide to move from one fabric or SDN to another we provide the flexibility to move with investment protection. Customers care about the attributes of the product itself. That drives their decisions more than anything else.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
After last week’s Innovation Day announcements, Juniper Networks has a range of SDN, data center fabric and data center switching products to choose from.Does it have too many? The addition of the new QFX10000 spine switch and Junos Fusion fabric may mean some product rationalization is in the works.“There is some level of complexity in product positioning,” acknowledges Juniper CEO Rami Rahim. “But if customers decide to move from one fabric or SDN to another we provide the flexibility to move with investment protection. Customers care about the attributes of the product itself. That drives their decisions more than anything else.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Cisco and VMware run virtually neck-and-neck in the SDN market, the two continue the war of words on the mindshare battlefield. Cisco posted another blog item last month which included points critical of VMware’s NSX network virtualization platform -- Cisco believes VMware imposes restrictions on which version of Open vSwitch to use with the product and limits VTEP integration:To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Juniper Networks this week rolled out new data center switches to help customers address opportunities and challenges presented by cloud computing.The new switches are yet another line of data center spine switches that have virtually no integration with Juniper’s three-and-a-half year old QFabric portfolio.Juniper says there will be 7.6 billion Internet users with 50 billion connected devices by 2020, continually accessing data around the globe. This necessitates higher levels of network performance, automation and scale for both enterprises and service providers to address growing demands on their IT infrastructure.+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Juniper unveils new fabric switch, architecture +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Juniper Networks this week rolled out new data center switches to help customers address opportunities and challenges presented by cloud computing.The new switches are yet another line of data center spine switches that have virtually no integration with Juniper’s three-and-a-half year old QFabric portfolio.Juniper says there will be 7.6 billion Internet users with 50 billion connected devices by 2020, continually accessing data around the globe. This necessitates higher levels of network performance, automation and scale for both enterprises and service providers to address growing demands on their IT infrastructure.+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Juniper unveils new fabric switch, architecture +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Lots of networking activity at this week’s Open Compute Project Summit as vendors develop specifications designed to further abstract the dependencies of hardware and software.Dell submitted to OCP a Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) designed to enable a common language between vendor network operating systems and switch silicon. The submission is currently under review and Dell expects acceptance.SAI is an API to express switch abstractions. With it, third-party developers can build applications to help customers tailor their network equipment to meet certain infrastructure requirements, Dell says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Jim Duffy