Linux container company Docker this week said it would acquire SDN start-up SocketPlane, a developer of a native networking stack for Docker software.Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. SocketPlane
SocketPlane was founded last fall by former Cisco, Red Hat, HP, OpenDaylight and Dell officials. The company is looking to bring enterprise-grade networking to the Docker ecosystem by developing software designed to address the performance, availability and scale requirements of networking in large, container-based cloud deployments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco is preparing to open up its Nexus 9000 switches for further programmability, perhaps even supporting a popular open source tool for booting them up.A Cisco white paper posted on the company’s website and then withdrawn last week stated that the company’s Nexus 9000 switches, in standalone NX-OS mode, can now support the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE). ONIE is a network boot loader to install software, including operating systems from multiple vendors, on bare metal Ethernet network switches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco seems undaunted by HP’s nearly $3 billion acquisition of wireless LAN titan Aruba Networks. Cisco is the market leader in WLANs while HP gains a solid No. 2 position by acquiring Aruba.Said Jeff Reed, vice president of Cisco’s Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions Group:
Enterprise mobility continues to be a key driver of growth in the networking industry. While some companies seek to bolt on wireless to their existing portfolios, mobility remains at the core of our networking business. As the clear market leader, we have delivered unified wired, wireless and cloud-managed platforms to our customers for years and will continue to do so.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade has announced plans to acquire Connectem, a privately-held company whose virtualization software maps mobile workloads to clouds.Terms of the all-cash deal were not disclosed.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD:Why SDN All-Stars are heading to Brocade+Connectem’s LTE virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) software for x86 servers is intended to eliminate the constraints of physical equipment while working with traditional node-based EPC architectures, Brocade says.Combined with Brocade’s other software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualized network functions (NFV) offerings – many from the acquisitions of Vyatta, Vistapointe, and the SteelApp virtual ADC product line from Riverbed -- Connectem’s software enables service providers and enterprises to connect mobile and IoT devices, data centers, and public and private clouds, Brocade says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade has announced plans to acquire Connectem, a privately-held company whose virtualization software maps mobile workloads to clouds.Terms of the all-cash deal were not disclosed.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD:Why SDN All-Stars are heading to Brocade+Connectem’s LTE virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) software for x86 servers is intended to eliminate the constraints of physical equipment while working with traditional node-based EPC architectures, Brocade says.Combined with Brocade’s other software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualized network functions (NFV) offerings – many from the acquisitions of Vyatta, Vistapointe, and the SteelApp virtual ADC product line from Riverbed -- Connectem’s software enables service providers and enterprises to connect mobile and IoT devices, data centers, and public and private clouds, Brocade says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade has announced plans to acquire Connectem, a privately-held company whose virtualization software maps mobile workloads to clouds.Terms of the all-cash deal were not disclosed.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD:Why SDN All-Stars are heading to Brocade+Connectem’s LTE virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) software for x86 servers is intended to eliminate the constraints of physical equipment while working with traditional node-based EPC architectures, Brocade says.Combined with Brocade’s other software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualized network functions (NFV) offerings – many from the acquisitions of Vyatta, Vistapointe, and the SteelApp virtual ADC product line from Riverbed -- Connectem’s software enables service providers and enterprises to connect mobile and IoT devices, data centers, and public and private clouds, Brocade says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Disaggregation seems to be all the rage in networking these days.HP is the latest to decouple merchant silicon-based hardware from operating system software, following Dell and Juniper. The strategy is to attract web-scale companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon who need the flexibility, choice, rapid deployment/decommissioning and cost efficiency of commodity “white box” switches capable of running a variety of software packages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Disaggregation seems to be all the rage in networking these days.HP is the latest to decouple merchant silicon-based hardware from operating system software, following Dell and Juniper. The strategy is to attract web-scale companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon who need the flexibility, choice, rapid deployment/decommissioning and cost efficiency of commodity “white box” switches capable of running a variety of software packages.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Avaya this week extended its SDN arsenal with an architecture and supporting products designed to simplify enterprise connectivity and application provisioning.Avaya’s SDN Fx architecture is comprised of new and existing products intended to ease the onboarding of users and devices to the network. The Fx architecture is built on Avaya’s existing Shortest Path Bridging-based fabric networking technology but also includes new offerings to extend SDN from the data center to the network edge.Those new products and features include an Open Networking Adapter, which is designed to provide a plug-n-play network connection for any device with an Ethernet port, including medical devices, manufacturing machines and branch office switches. The ONA is a card deck-sized appliance that Avaya says provisions a QoS-customized virtual path across the network and manages thousands of devices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HP has joined the disaggregation party through two partnerships that will produce a branded white box switch capable of running multiple network operating systems.HP has expanded a relationship with Accton Technology to offer two new switches initially, and more later this year. The switches will be low-cost, software-independent white box hardware targeted at Web scale data centers supporting cloud, mobile, social media and big data workloads.Under a second arrangement, HP will offer Cumulus Networks’ Cumulus Linux network operating system on the Accton switches. Cumulus Linux runs on a variety of white box and branded switching hardware based on merchant silicon, and is intended to make the software side of networking hardware independent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HP has joined the disaggregation party through two partnerships that will produce a branded white box switch capable of running multiple network operating systems.HP has expanded a relationship with Accton Technology to offer two new switches initially, and more later this year. The switches will be low-cost, software-independent white box hardware targeted at Web scale data centers supporting cloud, mobile, social media and big data workloads.Under a second arrangement, HP will offer Cumulus Networks’ Cumulus Linux network operating system on the Accton switches. Cumulus Linux runs on a variety of white box and branded switching hardware based on merchant silicon, and is intended to make the software side of networking hardware independent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco now has 1,700 customers for its Nexus 9000 switch and over 300 for its APIC controller, the central element of its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) programmable networking and SDN strategy. This is up from 970 and 200+, respectively, in the company’s fiscal first quarter.The number of ACI/APIC customers compared to the number of Nexus 9000 customers – Nexus 9000 is the hardware underlay or foundation for ACI – might seem underwhelming at first blush: only 20% were ACI customers in Q1 and less than 20% in Q2. But APIC just started shipping August 1, Cisco says, while the Nexus 9000 has been shipping for almost a year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s claim that its Nexus 9000 leaf switches have a VXLAN routing advantage over those based on Broadcom Trident II silicon is meeting some resistance. In announcing support for the BGP EVPN control plane for VXLAN on its Nexus 9000 switches, Cisco said its Nexus 9300 leaf switches, equipped with Cisco’s custom ALE ASIC, can route VXLAN overlay traffic, which the company touts as a benefit over Broadcom Trident II-based platforms from competitors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the advent of SDN, there’s been a lot of speculation about the future of the network administrator.Some doomsayers predict the network admin will be obsolete as network virtualization becomes the responsibility of the server or systems admin already in charge of server virtualization. Or that as SDN applications take on more network intelligence in order to program what network resources they need, the application developers might take over the role of network admin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade this week said it will acquire Riverbed Technology's SteelApp product line in an all-cash asset transaction. Terms were not disclosed.
SteelApp is a virtual application delivery controller (ADC) for enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications. The SteelApp product line controls traffic to and from applications to improve application delivery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco is adding a new control plane capability to its Nexus 9000 switches for customers not yet opting for or needing a full-blown application policy infrastructure.Cisco’s BGP Control Plane for VXLAN is designed to appeal to operators of multitenant clouds looking for familiar BGP routing protocol features with which to scale their networks and make them more flexible for the demands of cloud networking. VXLAN, which scales VLAN segmentation to 16 million endpoints, does not specify a control plane and relies on a flood-and-learn mechanism for host and endpoint discovery, which can limit scalability, Cisco says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell is celebrating the first anniversary of its Open Networking initiative, an effort to offer customers a choice of operating systems and applications on standard, merchant silicon-based hardware.Dell was one of, if not the first major vendor to disaggregate switching – separating the interdependencies of hardware and software so customers, in this case, can run a variety of operating systems on Dell switches. Juniper followed suit with an Open Compute Platform-based switch that can run its Junos operating system, or another that’s ported to the OCP-based hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Big Switch Networks this week rolled out a new release of its cloud fabric software, which includes support for VMware vSphere environments and Dell switches, among other features.Big Cloud Fabric was released in the third quarter of 2014. It is an SDN fabric designed for bare metal switches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The Layer 2-3 Ethernet switch market is expected to exceed $25 billion in 2019, a compounded annual growth of over 2% from 2014, according to Dell’Oro Group.Data center switching will drive most of the growth in the market. Data center switching growth will be driven exclusively by the cloud, with the enterprise market declining slowly, towards the end of the decade, Dell’Oro expects. MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Will enhanced servers do away with the need for switches?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Pluribus Networks, an SDN start-up developing converged compute, network, storage and virtualization systems, said it raised $50 million in a Series D round of funding led by Temasek, an investment company based in Singapore with a net portfolio value of $177 billion.Temasek is an investor in Chinese search engine company Alibaba.+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD:SDN market could hit $18 billion by 2018 +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Jim Duffy