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
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. In April 2014, Zeus Kerravala wrote in Network World that the software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) is now a business imperative. He cites several reasons why the time is right for companies to reconsider their WAN architecture.First of all, cloud and mobile computing, as well as applications such as video and voice over the network, are creating vastly different traffic patterns than the old style of client/server computing. Next, business agility is the enterprise mantra today, but traditional WAN architectures are too inflexible to enable the much-needed application agility. And last but not least, the complexity of the WAN makes it increasingly difficult to make even small changes in a reasonable timeframe.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Disruptive innovation in infrastructure is on the rise, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Software Defined Networking movement. But while much of the SDN discussion has focused on the data center, the better initial use case might be in the wide area network. One advocate of that approach is Michael Elmore, IT Senior Director of the Enterprise Network Engineering Infrastructure Group at Cigna, a global health service company headquartered in Bloomfield, Connecticut. Michael is also on the board of Open Network Users Group (ONUG). Network World Editor in Chief John Dix asked Elmore to participate in an email-based Q&A to explore the promise of Software Defined WANS. 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
Brocade this week said it is shipping its SDN controller and offering it free for one year.Brocade’s Vyatta Controller was announced last September. It is based on the OpenDaylight open source “Helium” release.+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD: Why SDN All-Stars are heading to Brocade +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Developers of Open vSwitch, the open source networking component for hypervisors, are adding network virtualization capabilities to the code. According to this post in Network Heresy, the developers are working on the Open Virtual Network (OVN) project which is intended to bring native support for virtual network abstractions, such as virtual Layer 2 and Layer 3 overlays and security groups, to OVS.The design goal of the OVN developers is to have a production quality implementation that can operate at significant scale, state the authors of the post, two of whom work at VMware. A third is CEO of DevOps start-up Socketplane, and the fourth is the chief technologist at Red Hat.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AT&T spends some $20 billion per year on capital expenditures, the bulk of that on its massive network, and recently announced a bold plan to adopt Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization in a big way. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix caught up with AT&T Senior Vice President of Architecture & Design Andre Fuetsch for a deeper dive on the grand plan.
Let’s start with some background on your role. As I understand it you lead a team of 2,000 engineers and computer scientists.
Basically I’m over the architecture and design organization and that includes AT&T’s advanced research organization, AT&T Labs. Our Foundry is also under my purview, which is basically an innovation program where we invite select vendors to come play in our sandbox and innovate new ideas. The bulk of my organization is architecture and design, as well as development. What we do is take the architectures we’re working on, prototype them, build them out, test them, and, if they look viable, scale them and put them into production.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The predictions for data center and SDN in 2015 are still rolling in. Technology Business Research says software will pervade the data center while start-up Plexxi believes policy and disaggregation will be front and center.Here’s the link to TBR’s 2015 Data Center Predictions. Some of the more interesting prognostications in it are the acceleration of SDN in the enterprise and the ability of hyperconvergence to converge.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Why is it that a who’s who of SDN developers is landing at Brocade?
Over the past two years, the company has lured a handful of industry All-Stars to work on software enabling its networking portfolio, including Fibre Channel storage-area network switches, and Ethernet switches and routers. The most recent hire is Michael Bushong, who jumped from start-up Plexxi to Brocade late last year to run product management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. Click here to subscribe. As 2014 drew to a close, Network World contributor Steve Alexander proclaimed 2015 to be the year that Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) go mainstream. Calling them "transformative technologies," Alexander expects enterprises to consume services from telcos and other service providers instead of buying traditional data center hardware appliances.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The past year was a frantic one in the SDN industry as many players made strategic and tactical moves to either get out ahead of the curve on software-defined networking, or try to offset its momentum.
Here’s a rundown of what transpired in 2014 as a place setter for the year ahead in SDN.
+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD See a list of all our 2014 wrap ups +
December
Juniper unveils a version of its Junos operating system for Open Compute Platform switches, commencing a disaggregation strategy that’s expected to be followed by at least a handful of other major data center switching players in an effort to appeal to white box customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here