Zeus Kerravala
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Zeus Kerravala
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Chuck Robbins rewires Cisco
When Chuck Robbins took over the CEO position at Cisco from the popular and iconic John Chambers there was a tremendous amount of speculation as to whether Robbins would just continue the path that Chambers was going or would he run Cisco his way. After less than a year, Robbins is coming out of Chambers shadow much the same way Steve Young did when he took over the QB position in the post Joe Montana era. This week Robbins restructured Cisco’s enormous engineering unit to better align with market trends. In an email to the company Robbins outlined his plan to create four engineering groups. Bob Brown covered the basic structure of the reorganization in this post, but I’ll go into a bit more detail.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco’s acquisition of Synata brings search to Spark
Last week the Enterprise Connect trade show was held in Orlando, Florida. The show is the collaboration industry’s largest event and because of that, there were dozens of vendors that issued press releases touting the latest and greatest innovations in the market.One announcement that I thought flew under the radar was Cisco’s intent to acquire privately held Synata. Jim Duffy wrote a short article covering the news but the importance of this acquisition hasn’t been discussed.Explaining what Syanta does is fairly simple. It lets user search encrypted files and messages, even if they’re stored in cloud storage drives. Cisco will use this technology to enhance its team-messaging product, Cisco Spark.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Alcatel Lucent Enterprise brings pay per use to the network
It seems like we can buy almost anything as a service today. Servers, storage, applications and collaboration can all be purchased using an “as a service” model. Recently Sprint introduced both Workplace and Mobility as a service to add to the growing portfolio of consumption-based products. In our consumer lives the Amazon button turns consumer goods into a service. The one piece of technology that’s still difficult to buy as a service is the network.Earlier this month, I authored this post discussing how the network needs to evolve into this kind of model.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Pica8 overcomes white box obstacles
The evolution to software defined networking (SDN) is well underway. ZK Research (I am an employee of ZK Research) shows that almost 80% of organizations are interested in the topic, although fewer than 10% have actually deployed the technology. This means there are a huge number of organizations trying to understand the best way to deploy SDN. One such way is to leverage the cost benefits of a white box switch with some sort of standards-based technology such as OpenFlow. Low cost hardware, industry standards and a few best practices should make for a relatively straightforward deployment. Not so fast. Not all white boxes are created equal. While all white box switches do offer compelling economics, they are known to have some performance issues. White box switches deployed as a top of rack (ToR) need handle tens of thousands of flows.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Riverbed delivers the hyper-converged edge
Hyper-converged infrastructure in the data center has been all the rage over the past few years. In the data center, hyper-convergence is a system with tightly integrated compute, storage, network and virtualization technology. Its main value proposition is to simplify the architecture of the data center and enables it to be controlled through software. Despite the strong value proposition of hyper-convergence, the technology has remained focused on the data center with little applicability to the branch. The irony of this is that branch offices are often the lifeblood of organizations and is where the majority of work is done. Despite the criticality of the branch, the technology deployed in these locations is often old, inefficient and performs poorly and can often put businesses at risk. WAN outages cause application outages, which directly costs the organization money.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Riverbed delivers the hyper-converged edge
Hyper-converged infrastructure in the data center has been all the rage over the past few years. In the data center, hyper-convergence is a system with tightly integrated compute, storage, network and virtualization technology. Its main value proposition is to simplify the architecture of the data center and enables it to be controlled through software. Despite the strong value proposition of hyper-convergence, the technology has remained focused on the data center with little applicability to the branch. The irony of this is that branch offices are often the lifeblood of organizations and is where the majority of work is done. Despite the criticality of the branch, the technology deployed in these locations is often old, inefficient and performs poorly and can often put businesses at risk. WAN outages cause application outages, which directly costs the organization money.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco flexes some data center muscle at Partner Summit 2016
Cisco’s reseller event, Partner Summit, kicked off this week in San Diego. The event is normally a big one for Cisco as thousands of its resellers gather to be updated on the latest, greatest plans for Cisco. All eyes are on Chuck Robbins as this is the first Partner Summit held under his watch as the company’s CEO. The event kicks off today and has already seen Cisco make a couple of significant announcements in the data center.This morning Cisco announced its intention to acquired Silicon Valley based, CliQr Technologies for $260 million. The 105-person company provides application centric cloud orchestration that enables customers to model, deploy and manage across bare metal, virtual and container environments regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premise or in a private or public cloud. The technology will be used to help Cisco customers move to a seamless hybrid cloud model where the information can be moved between clouds, and resources can be provisioned across clouds. CliQr’s technology is already tightly integrated into a number of Cisco data center products including ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) and Unified Computing System (UCS). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please Continue reading
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Cisco flexes some data center muscle at Partner Summit 2016
Cisco’s reseller event, Partner Summit, kicked off this week in San Diego. The event is normally a big one for Cisco as thousands of its resellers gather to be updated on the latest, greatest plans for Cisco. All eyes are on Chuck Robbins as this is the first Partner Summit held under his watch as the company’s CEO. The event kicks off today and has already seen Cisco make a couple of significant announcements in the data center.This morning Cisco announced its intention to acquired Silicon Valley based, CliQr Technologies for $260 million. The 105-person company provides application centric cloud orchestration that enables customers to model, deploy and manage across bare metal, virtual and container environments regardless of whether the infrastructure is on premise or in a private or public cloud. The technology will be used to help Cisco customers move to a seamless hybrid cloud model where the information can be moved between clouds, and resources can be provisioned across clouds. CliQr’s technology is already tightly integrated into a number of Cisco data center products including ACI (Application Centric Infrastructure) and Unified Computing System (UCS). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please Continue reading
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Fibre Channel is still alive and kicking
In 1897 the great American author, Mark Twain was rumored to have stated, “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”. In the tech industry, Fibre Channel could make the same statement. It seems that for years, the death of Fibre Channel has been speculated, as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) or even IP networks would be the death knell for the more traditional storage protocol.However, Fibre Channel is still alive and kicking. It’s certainly not the high growth market it once was but the market has maintained about a $2 billion run rate over the past few years. The big driver for the continued investment has been the rise of flash-based storage. The value proposition of flash is speed so it makes sense to deploy a storage network that is as fast as possible.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Security product solves the network Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
If you’re a physics fan like me, you’ll know the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that states you cannot know a particle's exact location and velocity at the same time. If you shine a light on the particle to see where it is, you change the speed or direction causing a big problem for particle physicists. Network security has a similar conundrum. Every organization wants the best possible security but often any kind of increase in network visibility to improve security requires a reduction in performance because of the overhead associated with that task. A ZK Research (I am an employee of ZK Research) study last year revealed a couple of interesting but not surprising facts. The first is that almost half the respondents claim they must continually make trade offs between network performance and security. The second one is that a little over a third of the respondents actually turn security features off, that is make the environment less secure, in order to maintain performance. So security professionals are always in a state of juggling performance and security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Gigamon brings big data analytics to security
The IT security environment has changed significantly over the past decade. Ten years ago, network security was certainly challenging but straightforward. Most organizations had a single network ingress/egress entry point and protected it with a high performance firewall. Today, the environment is completely different. Technologies like Internet of Things, cloud computing, software defined networking, BYOD and mobility have made IT much more complicated than ever before. The increase in IT complexity means more attack surfaces and more entry points that need to be protected. IT is now facing an asymmetric challenge where the security team must protect dozens or even hundreds of entry points where hackers merely have to find one way in. Putting a firewall at every possible entry point, which includes branch offices, wireless access points, consumer devices and IoT endpoints would be prohibitively expensive and complicated to manage.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Why VCE customers should embrace, not fear, Dell’s merger with EMC
2015 was filled with many big technology acquisitions, the most notable of which was Dell dropping a whopping $67 billon for EMC. One of the most interesting questions that has been raised regarding the acquisition is what happens to the EMC Federation companies, most notably, VCE (disclosure: VMware is a client of ZK Research).VCE was founded as a joint venture between three market-leading vendors – VMware, Cisco, and EMC – to deliver a converged solution comprised of products from the three companies. In October of 2014, VCE announced it was acquiring controlling interest in the JV from Cisco (VMware was a minority shareholder).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Riverbed acquires Ocedo, accelerates its SD-WAN timeline
Riverbed has been the market leader and de facto standard in WAN optimization for well over a decade. When Riverbed first launched its flagship product, Steelhead, the company took off like a rocket, proving to be a panacea to almost all private WAN woes. In fact, one network manager once described Riverbed to me as “network crack,” meaning once you get a taste of it, you need to continually get more.However, times have changed and more and more organizations are evolving to SD-WANs. This doesn’t obviate the need for WAN optimization, but it certainly shifts the emphasis to other technologies. The SD-WAN space has been filled with startups because the traditional vendors, like Riverbed, were slow to come to market with solutions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco launches tool to uncover shadow IT in the enterprise
"You can't manage what you can't see" is a popular saying in the network industry. Historically, it's been used for traditional network management, with the thought being that one can't fix a problem on the network without having visibility into the applications, traffic flows, and infrastructure. Recently, though, the meaning of that phrase has changed as "shadow IT" has become increasingly popular. Shadow IT is when lines of business or individual users purchase their own cloud services without any involvement in IT. The problem today is very real. An interesting data point to support this comes from a ZK Research report that showed that 96% of organizations claim to be running cloud applications that are not sanctioned by IT (disclosure: I am an employee of ZK Research).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How network segmentation provides a path to IoT security
Earlier this month I attended Cisco’s Internet of Things World Forum in Dubai (disclosure: Cisco is a client of ZK Research). One of the things I liked about the event is that it showcased a wide variety of uses cases across a number of different vertical industries. Some were in the ideation phase, some were early stage, and some fully deployed. While many of the use cases were quite different, there was one point of commonality, and that’s the need for security.The Internet of things (IoT) poses quite a different challenge for security and IT professionals. Traditional cybersecurity is becoming increasingly difficult even though most IT devices being connected have some basic security capabilities. Now consider the operational technology (OT) being connected to our company networks to enable IoT. These are devices like medical equipment, factory floor machines, drills, shipping containers, and other things that have no inherent security capabilities and the most basic network functions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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10 most important networking acquisitions of 2015
Big money2015 was a big year for mergers and acquisitions in the networking industry. Here are the ones that are most likely to have the biggest long-term impact on the industry.Check Point Software acquires Hyperwise and LacoonAlthough these were small acquisitions (both in the $80 million range), they were notable as Check Point rarely makes acquisitions. Check Point has been one of the leaders in combatting threats that go through a firewall, but more hackers are now finding ways to get around perimeter security. These acquisitions help Check Point’s customers fight the security fight on other fronts.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Arista steps outside the data center with Cloud Connect solution
The rise of virtualization has had a profound impact on the technology industry. In the networking industry, perhaps no vendor has ridden the wave of cloud more than Arista Networks. The company was founded a little over a decade ago, and today it is a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of over $4.6 billion. However, almost all of Arista's revenues today come from selling products inside the data center. The company was one of the most aggressive vendors in pushing the concept of a spine/leaf architecture as a replacement for a traditional multi-tier network. This week, Arista announced its first solution that is outside the data center. The Arista Cloud Connect solution connects public and private cloud data centers. Moving into the data center interconnect market is a logical extension for Arista and highlights just how far merchant silicon has come over the past decade.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Juniper steps up its data center game
This week, Juniper is holding its "NXTWORK 2015" customer summit in Silicon Valley. At the event, Juniper made a number of data center announcements. These announcements come about a month after Juniper rolled out its "Unite" architecture aimed at the enterprise campus (disclosure: Juniper Networks is a client of ZK Research). While the two announcements are aimed at different parts of the network, there is a common focal point, and that's helping businesses build networks that are cloud-ready. The Unite architecture was focused on simplification, whereas Juniper's play in the data center is more about customer choice and automation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cisco’s Lancope acquisition aims to improve network security from the inside out
Enterprise IT has gone through many major shifts over the past several decades. The industry currently sits in the midst of another major transformation as more and more businesses are striving to become digital organizations. The building blocks of the digital era are technologies like cloud computing, mobility, virtualization, and software defined networking, which are significantly different than legacy technologies.But what about security? In addition to new IT tools and processes, businesses need to think about how to secure the digital enterprise. While the technologies listed above allow us to work and serve customers in ways we never could before, they also create new security vulnerabilities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Arista launches new security feature to cover growing East-to-West data center traffic
Five years ago, almost all of the traffic in a data center moved in a North-South direction. Traffic moved from one server through the different tiers of a network, passed through the core, and then up to another server. Enabling security and application optimization services with this model was fairly simple. Put a big, honking firewall or ADC in the core of the network and all traffic would pass through these devices.However, the past few years have seen an explosion in East-West traffic, primarily driven by servers and virtual machines (VMs) talking to each other and to database systems, storage systems, and other applications in the data center. Typically, East-West traffic never passes through the core of the network, where it can have the benefit of security inspection. Also, the volume of East-West traffic is rapidly becoming a much higher percentage relative to North-South. This makes it easier for a piece of malware that may have breached an unpatched server to spread laterally. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here