Traditional Network Vendors Advancing Switching

In the past few days, I've seen a lot of new product announcement from the switch vendors.  I am pasting a few Network World article links below as they cover the news quite well.  My overall impression is as follows:

• Progress is impressive, but still very much a "speeds and feeds" game.  Density is ever more important in the "flat network" era.  Overall, the big differentiation is on the HDN not SDN.
• When it comes to SDN, OpenFlow and OpenStack are important part of their story
• HP finally has a virtual switch story with its 5900v after Cisco Nexus 1000V and IBM 5000v roll-out.  This is about 4-5 years behind the first mover.

Happy to hear your thoughts too?  Have a nice weekend,

-howie

Arista: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/050113-arista-269279.html
    . "The 7500E is a 30Tbps, 14 billion packets/sec non-blocking switch housed in the same 11 RU chassis as the 7500. Densities per chassis are 1,152 10G, 288 40G or 96 100G Ethernet."
    . $10k for each 100G!

HP: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/043013-hp-sdn-269254.html
    . "HP also unveiled a virtual switch to run under server hypervisors. The FlexFabric Virtual Switch 5900v supports the IEEE's Ethernet Virtual Bridging -- a.k.a. "VEPA" -- standard for offloading some switching capabilities from the server to a physical switch. The 5900v is optimized for VMware environments and supports mobility and management of network policies for virtual machines
configured through VMware hypervisors."
    . FlexFabric 5,900 ToR, added VEPA
    . FlexFabric 11,908 aggregation switch, 64 40G, OF1.3, 768 10G and
256 40G, TRILL/SPB
    . FlexFabric 12,900 core

Brocade: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/043013-brocade-data-center-269231.html
    . vRouter from Vyatte and OpenStack Plug-in

Juniper: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/032513-juniper-sdn-268073.html
    . EX9200 based on MX technology/asic, Juniper's 40/100G play (likely will limit Juniper's QFabric data center switch to 10G-only)
    . Separately they announced JunosV based on Contrail technology, leveraging XMPP.  Juniper is pushing XMPP into Open Daylight as well.

Cisco's Insieme Business Unit (no public announcement yet):
   . a fixed 36x40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) device;
   . a modular devices supporting 288 40G;
   . a modular devices supporting 576 40G;
   . a SND controller supporting those fabric switches