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Ooredoo Kuwait rolls out unified cloud for NFV

Ooredoo Kuwait has successfully deployed network functions virtualisation (NFV) architecture and its IT applications on a single, unified cloud, it was announced this week.

The single cloud is based on VMware's vCloud for NFV platform, and was rolled out as part of Ooredoo's ‘Unify' initiative, which aims to take advantage of a software-defined data centre architecture, as well as NFV and software-defined networking (SDN).

VMware's professional services team partnered with the operator and its virtual network functions (VNF) vendor, Huawei, to design and deploy the VMware vCloud for NFV platform and virtual network functions into a test environment in less than three months. The solution supported the seamless transfer of the virtualised Core IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) from test environment to Ooredoo's production IT environment, and enabled Ooredoo to conduct its first voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) call.

"Reliability and availability were key factors in our decision to work with VMware. The production-proven VMware technology and our previous experience with the high levels of technical support offered by VMware professional services gave us the confidence to move to a unified cloud platform," said Mijbil Al-Ayoub, director of Corporate Comms, Ooredoo Kuwait.

"The speed at which we have been able to trial our unified cloud and onboard the VoLTE service functions into our IT network has exceeded our expectations. We did a joint R&D project that took only two months to complete, and we finalised the development of our vIMS product that can be deployed in a production, commodity infrastructure, automatically in only 3.5 hours."

The Ooredoo platform uses VMware's policy-based resource allocation features to maintain application service level agreement (SLA) enforcement, and software-defined networking capabilities of the VMware NSX network virtualisation platform to address NFV network scalability needs, multi-tenancy with microsegmentation, capacity on demand and QoS. VMware NSX is a main pillar in segregating tenants across Ooredoo‘s single converged private cloud.

"We're delighted to be working with such forward-thinking customers who understand the value of a platform-based deployment strategy for NFV," said David Wright, vice president, Telecommunications and NFV Group, VMware.

"By making the decision to deploy and manage a horizontally virtualised platform capable of supporting multivendor VNFs and IT workloads, Ooredoo Kuwait has created a powerful service environment capable of delivering high-value services to customers while managing operational costs."

Telstra Turns On 100G Subsea Routes

To accommodate the growth of cloud-based data operators and connect the increasing number of data centres managed by service and content providers, Telstra today launched new 100 gigabits per second (100G Wavelength) connectivity across multiple ultra-long haul submarine cable routes globally.

Darrin Webb, Chief Operating Officer, Telstra Global Enterprise & Services, said Telstra’s 100G Wavelength service was designed to scale smartly and would also help deliver the connectivity and capacity needed to support market demand for larger bandwidth applications, including High Definition video services and emerging Ultra High Definition Television.

“As the volume of data generated and consumed worldwide continues to increase exponentially, it’s critical the infrastructure responsible for delivering it can cater to this need. Our job, as a trusted network partner, is to adapt and ensure there is capacity where it is required most by our customers.

“However the move to 100G is much more than just raw capacity. Alongside enhanced efficiency, 100G can help customers reduce operational expenditure and simplify network maintenance thanks to the service’s ability to consolidate bandwidths. It is also flexible enough to meet the requirements of most cable companies by offering landing station and point of presence options too.”

Delivered via Telstra’s Asia America Gateway (AAG Dedicated Fiber Pair), Reach North Asia Loop (RNAL), Telstra Endeavour, Australia-Japan Cable (AJC) and UNITY cable systems, the new 100G Wavelength service will cover Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Australia and the United States.

An Open Letter to Juniper’s New (Again!) CEO

From the first, Juniper has had perhaps the strongest hardware technology of any network vendor.  For a time, in the middle if the last decade, it also had some of the best marketing.  Then things turned for Juniper.  It brought in a CEO from Microsoft, a CEO who was supposed to take the company into the new age of software.  He didn’t.  They then got an activist investor who pressured for increased shareholder value.  A new CEO came in, one who seemed focused on spending the company’s cash to prop up share price.  Now, that CEO is gone too, after only about a year.  A new CEO from inside was named, Rami Rahim.  The obvious question is “Can he turn things around?”

The plus side is that Rami is a Juniper insider, a person who knows the company’s culture, people, and strength.  He headed R&D and was involved in Juniper’s seminal MX router.  You also might assume that getting a product guy into the role is a signal that the Juniper Board is changing its own course, and trying to build a future and not mortgage one.

The minus side is that Rami is an insider, perhaps too rooted in the boxes-and-chips mindset that was great a decade ago but that has now run its course.  The future of networking is software, and can a hardware guy preside over a spurt of software innovation?  Maybe, if he does the right thing.  What might that be?  Not being one to hold back on advice, let me give some (unsolicited) to Rami.

First and foremost, you have to create a solid story in SDN and NFV.  Not the anemic me-too stuff you have now, but something that will address what the operators really need to get from both technologies.  SDN and NFV stands or falls on software above the traditional network hardware–above the network in fact.  There’s a lot of open-source stuff out there that could be harnessed to tell a more complete story in service and network operations, orchestration, and management.  You need to get it, and tell that story.  You’ll have to fight your own roots, some old friends, and maybe even some old bosses to do this.  It’s necessary.

Second, you need to inspire your own company.  Juniper has had years of bad management at the top, and you’re suffering a major hemorrhage of human capital, the very mobile, industry-aware people you can’t afford to lose.  Most of them don’t want to go, but they don’t see a choice.  Give them one, and show them which choice is the right one.

Third, you have to inspire the Street.  Your predecessor wasn’t my kind of guy, but his biggest problem was that he was dancing to the Street’s tune.  Some of the problem is likely your own board; who hired your last (bad) pair in the first place?  Some of the problem is the “activist investor’.  You need to avoid having costs run away while you’re establishing your software credentials, but you also need to present a compelling vision of the network of the future and Juniper’s place in it to Wall Street.  Juniper needs to be a growth company to keep the sharks off your neck.  Show them how that comes about.  Otherwise they’ll just push you out too.

Fourth, you have to harness hardware and not let it drive the bus.  Hardware, in the IT world, is something you run software on.  We’re heading there in networking, but unlike the IT world there’s still a big opportunity to define just what it takes to run network software.  Juniper has done some great work in ASICS and done some lousy positioning of that work.  Mostly because it wanted the chip to be the center of the universe.  Make it a tool, the thing that can make your software better.

Fifth, harness your visions.  Juniper has been out in front of a lot of important developments.  Juniper talked about what became the cloud before anyone else.  They talked about proto-SDN and proto-NFV.  They then let all of that leadership go to waste.  Juniper had a separate chassis for an expanded control plane; it’s gone.  They had a global initiative to modernize service creation and deployment, one that actually had a better foundation than either SDN or NFV.  It’s gone too.  It may be too late to turn back the clock, but it’s darn sure not too late to turn back the practice of turning away.

Sixth, get your marketing mojo back.  Your positioning has been insipid for years now.  You can’t educate a marketplace, you have to inspire it.  You can’t spend cycles and money buying favorable opinions of yourself and your products; the customer sees through all this stuff.  The press will never sell your product.  analysts won’t sell it either.  YOU have to sell it, using those other channels to connect to your buyer, not to carry your message.   Your PR is awful, your website is awful.  But fixing both is a wave of the hand for you now.  Wave.

Finally, lead.  This is no time to build consensus, to seek opinions.  Be sensitive to their ideas, respect their views, but lead.  You need to get Juniper moving very quickly because they have sunk a very long way and there’s not much time left.  That time has been given to you.  Use it wisely and you’ll be remembered as the guy who made Juniper great again.

Juniper’s MX Router Goes Virtual

Juniper is virtualizing its MX routers and adding more cloud punch around its Junos operating system.

Today’s announcement of the vMX 3D Universal Edge Router will eventually put Juniper on the map in terms of having a virtual router to compete with Brocade‘s Vyatta line and Cisco‘s Cloud Services Router (CSR) 1000v. The vMX is due to be available in the first quarter.

Juniper is also introducing a turnkey network functions virtualization (NFV) platform called Contrail Cloud, consisting of a pre-configured cloud in a rack. Finally, Junos is giving a nod to the DevOps crowd by infusing Junos with functionality for tools such as Puppet and Chef.

All these moves are aimed at helping Juniper do what all the other vendors are doing: trying to keep up with the new and more fluid types of networking that are emerging, typified by software-defined networking (SDN). While Juniper is far from alone in that goal, it’s has had the added distraction of a corporate makeover initiated by CEO Shaygan Kheradpir, one that’s apparently not done yet.

Like Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent, Juniper prides itself on using ASICs at the heart of its routers — and is being forced to concede to the increasingly virtual nature of networking. Juniper recompiled the code that normally runs on the Trio chipset (the ASICs at the heart of the MX router line), optimizing it for an x86 host.

The result is a virtual router with all of the MX’s functionality, Juniper says. What’s gained is the ability to provision the router quickly because it’s virtual. What’s missing is the high performance of a hardware MX — which is why Juniper and the others will continue to argue that they need ASICs at the heart of their newest, biggest routers.

Juniper’s virtual-router entry is arriving relatively late, but the company hopes its heavy presence among service providers can compensate for that. The MX and the Trio chipset are already qualified for carrier networks, as is Junos, so it could be a simpler step to get the vMX qualified. “The testing will be more surgical than broad-sweep,” says Stephen Liu, Juniper’s senior director of service provider marketing.

Juniper also had some service-provider backing. AT&T started helping develop the vMX “over a year ago,” Liu says. Not coincidentally, Juniper has been qualified as a Domain 2.0 vendor for AT&T’s User-Defined Network Cloud.

The cost of a vMX license will vary depending on performance, which can be chosen in increments as low as 100 Mb/s. Juniper says it’s gotten a vMX to run at 160 Gb/s using multiple Intel CPU cores (details weren’t immediately available). For the moment, that would exceed the 80 Gb/s that Brocade is claiming out of its Vyatta virtual routers.

Something tells me we’re going to see those numbers ratchet upward as vendors try to one-up each other. But then again, virtual routers start getting unwieldy if you’re shooting for performance that’s too high. About 160 Gb/s is “where the economics start to peter out,” Liu says.

On Cloud and DevOps

Contrail Cloud is a turnkey platform for cloud computing, incorporating Juniper’s Contral SDN controller and third-party compute and storage elements. The whole thing can be orchestrated by Juniper’s own OpenStack distribution, although Juniper will also let customers pick other distributions.

Juniper has also partnered with Amdocs to integrate Contrail Cloud into service providers’ back-end systems.

As for the DevOps piece: Junos now includes client agents for Chef and Puppet. These bits of software are necessary for Chef or Puppet to talk to the device being managed or provisioned.

This makes Junos Chef- or Puppet-ready, which in turn should make it easier for IT staffers to tinker with the network. Until now, that’s been the purview of networking and IP experts. “What we’ve done now is make the IP layer bilingual,” Liu says.

Juniper is also introducing Junos Continuity, a feature that lets Juniper introduce new hardware features without forcing a revision to Junos. Liu describes it as a matter of making Junos more modular.

Cisco buys private cloud provider Metacloud

The company hopes to attract enterprises and operators with Metacloud's OpenStack-based technology

Cisco Systems plans to acquire privately held Metacloud, which specializes in private clouds based on the OpenStack-based open-source cloud computing platform.

The goal with the acquisition is to accelerate Cisco's Intercloud strategy, which was announced in March. At the time, the company said it would invest over US$1 billion to expand its cloud business over the next two years, including building an OpenStack-based "network of clouds" with partners.

Metacloud -- which is based in Pasadena, California -- fits like a glove with that strategy. The company deploys and operates private clouds for large organizations with a OpenStack-as-a-Service model. They run in the customer's own data center, according to Cisco.

With Metacloud's technology enterprises can match the operational benefits of public clouds with the security and control provided by private clouds, Cisco said. Service providers, meanwhile, can combine their public cloud deployments with remotely managed OpenStack private clouds, Cisco noted. The company foresees a future where enterprises use a mix of private and public clouds as well as on-premise applications.

That Cisco is showing a growing interest in private clouds doesn't come as a surprise. The price war between public cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft has forced much of the rest of the industry to change tactics, focusing more on private clouds in the process.

Cisco's acquisition of Metacloud is expected to be complete before the end of next month. Once that happens, the company's employees will join Cisco's Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services organization, Cisco said. The value of the deal was not disclosed.

Cisco unveils 'fog computing' to bridge clouds and the Internet of Things

 

If the hardest part of the “Internet of Things” is getting to the Things, Cisco Systems is offering a lifeline.

 

The so-called IoT encompasses a range of Internet-capable devices that could be almost limitless: Thermometers, electric meters, brake assemblies, blood pressure gauges and almost anything else that can be monitored or measured. The one thing they have in common is that they’re spread out around the world.

 

From a network builder’s perspective, the biggest challenge this poses is backhaul, or the links between devices in the field and data centers that can analyze and respond to the data they spit out. Typically, IoT devices talk to a small router nearby, but that router may have a tenuous and intermittent connection to the Internet.

 

There can be huge amounts of data coming out of these devices. For example, a jet engine may produce 10TB of data about its performance and condition in just 30 minutes, according to Cisco. It’s often a waste of time and bandwidth to ship all the data from IoT devices into a cloud and then transmit the cloud’s responses back out to the edge, said Guido Jouret, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Internet of Things Business Unit. Instead, some of the cloud’s work should take place in the routers themselves, specifically industrial-strength Cisco routers built to work in the field, he said.

 

“This is all about location,” Jouret said. Using local instead of cloud computing has implications for performance, security and new ways of taking advantage of IoT, he said.

Linux meets IOS

To equip its routers to do that computing, Cisco plans to combine Linux with its IOS (Internetworking Operating System) to create a distributed computing infrastructure for what the company calls “fog computing.” It plans ultimately to build computing capability into Cisco IoT routers, switches and IP (Internet Protocol) video cameras.

 

Cisco announced the architecture, called IOx, at the utility-industry trade show Distributech in San Antonio, Texas. IOx will start to come out for Cisco’s hardened IoT routers in the first half of this year.

 

To start with, the new architecture will make it easier for users to connect specialized, industry-specific systems at the edge of the network with Cisco routers, Jouret said. Different industries use many different types of connections for IoT devices, such as serial, Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Z-Wave. In the past, it’s been up to Cisco to modify its routers to work with whatever interface an industry may need, Jouret said. Adding Linux to its routers changes that equation.

 

“Now, instead of taking many months for Cisco to do the work of integrating this interface into our router, you can do it yourself,” Jouret said.

 

In addition, users will be able to port their current Linux applications to run on the Cisco infrastructure. They will also be able to create new sensing and control functions by writing applications using Cisco’s IOx SDK (software development kit), he said.

Keep it simple, stupid

IOx won’t turn routers into full data-center servers that crunch big data. The routers, which are much smaller and lower powered than Cisco’s classic enterprise and carrier gear, will carry out simpler tasks that need to be turned around quickly.

 

For example, if the parts of a rail car are instrumented to continually report whether they’re in good working condition, a router located on the rail car could collect and process that data by itself. It would do nothing until it received a signal that showed one of the parts might be headed for failure. Then the router could report back to the cloud over a 3G or satellite link. No wide-area bandwidth would be used to send the millions of “I’m OK” messages.

 

On top of reducing the data burden on networks, the distributed computing infrastructure will help IoT devices operate when network connections are lost and keep enterprises from having to transport sensitive data beyond the site where it’s produced, according to Cisco.

 

Distributing the handling of IoT data should speed up an enterprise’s data analysis and decision-making, according to analyst Steve Hilton of IoT consulting firm Machnation. The security implications are important, too, he said.

 

“This is particularly useful in situations where sensor data cannot be transported across country boundaries for legal or regulatory reasons—a very common issue in cloud IT deployments,” Machnation’s Hilton said in a blog post on Wednesday.

 

Cisco UCS 2.0: Flashy new data center servers revealed

 

Cisco this week unveiled the second generation of its successful data center server system with versions that incorporate solid state flash memory designed to speed data access and cut power usage.

At the same time, Cisco enhanced a management platform for its Unified Computing System (UCS) servers, and extended its line of Nexus data center switches to address requirements in the access and small core layers.

 

The new and enhanced products are intended to solidify Cisco’s entrenchment in data center networking, while continuing to build on and broaden the momentum it’s realized in data center servers since entering that market in 2009. Cisco says it now has 28,000 customers for the UCS server system and that the product line is growing at 60% per year, the fastest rate of any Cisco product.

 

 

The new UCS servers – dubbed the Invicta Series – employ flash memory technology obtained last year through the acquisition of a company called WHIPTAIL. Cisco says that solid-state memory systems situated closer to the workloads that need it enable faster access to data, and reduce power and space compared to traditional data center memory and storage methods.

 

“This is a good first step for Cisco” into storage, says Henry Baltazar of Forrester Research. “With convergence and software-defined IT, you need storage.”

 

The new offerings include the UCS Invicta C3124SA Appliance, for I/O acceleration in medium-scale environments; the Invicta Scaling System, a rack enclosure for the appliances that’s designed for scale and capacity; and integration with the UCS Director management system for single pane control.

 

The C3124A appliance can support 250,000 IOPS and 1.9GBps bandwidth while the Scaling System can support up to 4 million IOPS and 40GBps bandwidth.

 

The UCS Invicta Series is designed to improve the performance of data intensive workloads like analytics and intelligence, batch processing, email, online transaction processing, video, virtual desktops, database loads, and high-performance computing. Cisco says such solid-state memory systems can extract, integrate and analyze data 10x faster than conventional methods, run batches with interrupting workflow, break bottlenecks between servers and memory, and compress more video files faster.

 

“A key area for flash is performance sensitive apps,” Baltazar says. “It’s also good in virtualization [where it’s] easier to consolidate workloads with high performance flash. It’s really, really good at random access.”

 

In multi-tenant environments, Invicta can enable big relational databases to co-exist with virtual desktops on the same server platform.

 

Broader UCS management reach

 

Invicta’s integration with UCS Director is but one enhancement to the UCS management platform Cisco unveiled this week. Others include scale, extensibility, and support for heterogeneous environments.

 

UCS Director automates the converged IT infrastructure, Cisco says. This is different from UCS Manager, which controls a single UCS domain; UCS Central, which governs multiple UCS domains; and Intelligent Automation for Cloud, which is a cloud service orchestrator for private, hybrid and platform-as-a-service cloud services.

 

Each management layer can share information with the other, however.

 

For scale, UCS Director supports management of 50,000 virtual machines in large data centers, Cisco says. It also now includes a software developer’s kit for extensibility to the applications of third-party software vendors, and support for HP, Dell and IBM servers. It also supports management of network equipment from Brocade and F5, and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors in addition to those from VMware.

 

Cisco extends Nexus switching line

 

In switching, Cisco unveiled a six-slot, 9RU chassis for the Nexus 7700 line. The Nexus 7706 is targeted at small core, aggregation and data center interconnect applications, with a switching capacity of 21Tbps, 192 ports of 1/10G, 48 ports of 40G and nine ports of 100G Ethernet.

 

The existing Nexus 7718 and 7710 support switching capacities of 83Tbps and 42Tbps, respectively, and 1/10G densities of 768 ports and 384 ports.

 

Cisco also rolled out a 10G “F3” module for the Nexus 7700 line that is designed for core, spine, leaf, data center interconnect and SAN connectivity. It features programmability via OpenFlow, Cisco’s onePK, Python and XML APIs, and consumes 35% less power than previous generation “F2” modules for the Nexus 7000 line.

 

Cisco also unveiled its eventual successor to the Nexus 5500 access/leaf switches with the Nexus 5600. The 5672UP features 48 10G and six 40G ports. Sixteen of the 5672UP's 10G ports are so-called Unified Ports – ports that support Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet.

 

The 56128 supports 48 fixed 10G and four 40G ports, with expansion slots for 24 10G Unified Ports and two 40G ports. The 5600s feature 1 microsecond latency, VXLAN bridging and routing, OpenFlow, onePK, Python and XML programmability, and can scale to 1,152 ports through fabric extenders, Cisco says.

 

Some analysts believe Cisco should explain which APIs and protocols to use with certain applications or requirements when programming the switch.

 

“This should become a workhorse switch for them,” says Zeus Kerravala, principal at ZK Research.

 

“But when should users use one programming method vs. the other? Cisco offers the broadest toolkit out there, but when to use what?”

 

Unified Ports have also now been added to the Nexus 6000 40G switching line. The Nexus 6004 can now support 20 ports of 2/4/8G Fibre Channel, or 1/10G Ethernet, or 10G FCoE, Cisco says.

 

Cisco also added a new member to the Nexus 3100 access/leaf line of switches, which are based on merchant silicon. The 3172TQ supports 72 10GBase-T ports and can function as a VXLAN top-of-rack switch. It also supports OpenStack orchestration and provisioning, Cisco says.

 

Support for OpenStack (an open source cloud computing platform) has also been added to the Nexus 1000V virtual switch, which now supports KVM hypervisors in addition to its current VMware and Hyper-V support.

 

Lastly, Cisco added Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) partners. They write applications for Cisco’s APIC controller, which delegates and enforces application policies in an ACI fabric comprised of Cisco’s new Nexus 9000 switches.

 

New partners include A10 Networks, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudera, MapR and Catbird. They join

some 28 partners Cisco introduced at ACI’s launch late last year.

Cisco says it has over 305 customers for its Nexus 9000/ACI product line, three of which could be $40 million to $100 million deals.

The Nexus 7706 and F3 10G module are currently shipping. Everything else will be available later this quarter.

 

The Nexus 7706 switch starts at $65,000. F3 modules start at $44,000. The Nexus 5600 ranges in price from $32,000 to $36,000. A 24x10G, 2x40G expansion module for the 56128 switch costs $12,000. The Nexus 3172TQ costs $21,000.

 

 

Investor To Juniper: 7 Changes You Should Make Right Now

An Investor's Call To Action

On Jan. 13, one day before Juniper Networks kicked off its third annual Global Partner Conference in Las Vegas, hedge fund and Juniper Investor Elliott Management filed a report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That report, at its most basic level, called for Juniper to make some serious changes -- and soon.

 

Elliott Management, which holds a 6.2 percent investment stake in Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper, outlined several steps Juniper should take to reduce operating expenses, streamline its product portfolio, and, overall, become a leaner, better version of itself. "Our conclusion from [our] analysis is that Juniper's assets are valuable and strategic and that the business possesses several fundamental upside drivers over the medium-term but that its future will be increasingly difficult if Juniper continues with its existing strategy," Elliott Management wrote in a PDF presentation accompanying the SEC filing.

 

Here are 7 steps Elliot Management said Juniper should take now to put it "back on the path towards

success."

 

Take A Serious Look At Security

As Elliott Management sees it, Juniper needs to make some serious decisions regarding its security strategy. As a whole, Juniper's security story is one beset with "missteps and distractions," Elliot Management wrote, not the least of which was Juniper's "mis-executed" product transition away from its legacy NetScreen products. The investment firm also said the recent exit of Bob Muglia, executive vice president, Software Solutions Division, spells more bad news for Juniper's security business. "Juniper's board should undertake a strategic review of the security business, which is underperforming and now lacks a leader after Bob Muglia's recent resignation," the filing read.

 

Juniper admits that its security business has been a pain point. In 2010 and 2011, it faced significant backlash from partners and customers, who felt it was too slow to respond to customer complaints about its flawed SRX services gateways. "Given the security business' underperformance and dilution to Juniper's year-over-year growth profile, [Wall] Street analysts have repeatedly asked management if the business can be divested or de-emphasized," Elliott

 

Enterprise Switching, QFabric Need Attention, Too

Juniper's security strategy isn't the only one that needs to be shaken up a bit, Elliott Management urged.

 

Juniper's enterprise switching line -- and, especially, its QFabric data center fabric -- needs to be revisited, Elliott Management said, particularly as Juniper's overall switching share continues to sit at about 3 percent in a market "dominated by Cisco."

 

According to Elliott's report, Juniper has "overpromised and underdelivered" on the development and sales of QFabric, a product it spent two years and more than $100 million to make. The delayed launch of QFabric also gave Juniper competitors, including Cisco, Brocade and Arista, ample time to roll out their own data center fabric offerings, Elliott said.

 

"QFabric fell under scrutiny as a product that had failed to live up to its initial hype," the PDF reads.

 

Hold Off On M&As

According to Elliott Management, Juniper should pump the breaks when it comes to acquisitions -- especially if it wants to cut costs.

 

The investment firm said Juniper has spent over $7 billion on acquisitions since 1999, amounting to 111 percent of Juniper's overall enterprise value at the time Elliott began to "buy material amounts" of Juniper stock. That kind of spending needs to stop, according to the firm.

 

"Juniper should give strong consideration to halting its acquisition program while it focuses on execution in its existing businesses," the report said.

 

Elliott Management also slapped Juniper on the wrist for having moved forward with acquisitions in December (when it bought WANDL, a maker of network analysis and management software, for $60 million), especially with a new CEO starting in just two weeks, and Muglia having just left.

 

Cost-Cutting Is A Must

Elliott Management is urging Juniper to reduce its operating expenses by $200 million in 2014, a goal it said Juniper can achieve by focusing more on its "main business" and eliminating "lower risk-adjusted ROI projects."

 

Investors at Elliott said a $200 million reduction in operating expenses alone could increase Juniper's stock price between 24 percent and 41 percent, putting it somewhere between $28 and $32.

 

"Realization of a clearly articulated and meaningful cost savings plan can restore confidence in Juniper by communicating that the Company is prudently reducing spend while making targeted investments in an effort to maximize shareholder value," Elliott wrote in the PDF.

 

Ease Up On R&D Spend

Elliott Management called Juniper's R&D spend "excessive" compared to competitors like Cisco, HP and Riverbed, and urged the company to scale back on R&D investments as part of an overall cost-cutting plan.

 

"Juniper's R&D spend is significantly higher than its peers relative to revenue and per R&D employee, representing a significant source of savings as part of the recommended cost realignment plan," the PDF said. Elliott's analysis shows that Juniper spends roughly 27 percent more on its R&D employees compared to its competitors. If Juniper spent at the "average level" of its rivals, the investment firm said Juniper could save roughly $200 million each year.

 

Elliott's report also shows that Juniper's R&D spend represented roughly 21 percent of its overall revenue for the past 12 months. Cisco was the next biggest spender at 16 percent. Elliott said Juniper has invested more than $7.7 billion in R&D since its founding.

 

Stop Paying Engineers So Much

Not only does Juniper spend too much on its R&D employees -- it spends too much on its software engineers, too, according to Elliott Management.

 

The PDF said that Juniper pays the highest average base salary to its software engineers compared to its competitors, many of which, Elliott pointed out, have larger revenue bases and market caps.

 

Citing 2013 data from Glassdoor.com, Elliott said in the filing that Juniper spends more on its software engineers than tech giants, including Facebook, Google, Amazon and Yahoo. It also spends more than direct competitors, including Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Brocade and Arista. The average base salary for a Juniper software engineer, according to the report, is somewhere around $159,990. LinkedIn is next in line with $136,427.

 

Cisco, the PDF stated, pays its software engineers an average base salary of $109,491.

 

 

Make A Comeback In Service Provider Routing

Elliott Management was blunt in its PDF about Juniper losing "significant market share" in the service providing routing market -- but not all is lost yet, according to the firm.

 

As Elliott sees it, if Juniper can refocus on its main service provider routing marketing by eliminating the "distraction" caused by its nonrouting R&D projects and "failed efforts" in security and switching, the company could potentially regain the 6 points in market share it's lost in the edge router market since 2005. What's more, Elliott said Juniper could regain the 12 points it's lost in the core routing market since 2005 -- if, again, it can push those "distractions" aside.

 

According to Elliott's filing, which cited market share data from Infonetics, Juniper's market share in the service provider edge router market in 2005 was 20 percent, compared to 14 percent in 2012. In the service provider core router market, Juniper's market share in 2005 was 36 percent, compared to 24 percent in 2012.

 

Cisco Preps Its Next Core Router: The 'CTR'

The next Cisco Systems Inc. is apparently named the "CTR" and is aiming for densities of at least 1Tbit/s per slot, according to a Cisco document obtained by Light Reading.

Plenty of details are left out, such as when the CTR might ship. But the document makes it clear that the platform is meant to be a step beyond the CRS-3 core router:

• The router would support 1Tbit/s per slot in the form of a card with ten 100Gbit/s ports. Whether this card would be available right away isn't clear.That would still fall short of the 12 100Gbit/s ports per card that Arista announced for its switches, but, depending on when the card arrives, it could be the best density for a core router. As a point of comparison, the Alcatel-Lucent 7950 Extensible Routing System got announced last year with a theoretical per-slot capacity of 1.6Tbit/s (800Gbit/s if you're not double-counting the traffic).

• It would double as an MPLS label-switched router, to provide the kind of Layer 2 "lean core" (Cisco's phrase) that some carriers are talking about.

• It would be an ASIC-driven design, as usual. The network processor involved would carry 336 packet-processing cores on-chip and would handle both Ethernet processing and OTN framing.

• Cisco declined to comment on any of this, but sources close to the company confirmed Thursday that that a new core-routing platform is planned for launch later this year.

Such a system would give Cisco an answer to the Leading-Lights-award-winning AlcaLu 7950, which Cisco initially disparaged as not being a core core router.

Separately, the document appears to confirm plans to produce 10Gbit/s and 40Gbit/s versions of the CPAK interface -- that is, modules with ten 10Gbit/s ports or two 40Gbit/s ports.

CPAK is Cisco's home-grown optical interface module, built with silicon photonics and providing power and density levels compatible with the CFP2 standard.

New Cloud Managed Services and Catalyst Switch

Since our acquisition of Meraki in late 2012, you have heard us talking about the midmarket and new opportunities for channel partners and customers. I’m pleased to say that today, at the Cisco Partner Summit in Boston, we have some exciting updates for you. Specifically, we’ll focus on our Made for Midmarket portfolio which includes a range of new product offerings, services and solutions designed for midsize customers.

As part of Cisco’s newly formed Cloud Networking Group, we are unveiling our complete cloud managed networking portfolio specifically focused for midmarket deployments, consisting of security appliances, switches and wireless LANs.
Get Your Heads in the Cloud – Services and Revenue Opportunities

New for partners today we are introducing the Cisco Meraki Managed Services Dashboard – bringing together a number of features for Managed Service Providers (MSP) to offer cloud-managed networking as a service to their customers. This MSP dashboard features specific tools, analytics and monitoring capabilities and is built to allow our service providers to manage end-customer networks easily from a central location while still maintaining separation and security of each customer network.

Key Highlights of the Managed Services Dashboard

• MSP Portal – Service providers can easily monitor the health of end-customer networks from a centralized location.
• Manage your Brand: MSPs can customize the logo on the dashboard to promote their own brand with end-customers. Cisco will work directly with the MSP to customize the content.
• Support Ticketing: Easy for MSPs to create, monitor and respond to support cases with Cisco staff.
• Remote Live Tools: A complete set of tools that make remote monitoring of the network significantly easier – a perfect fit for Helpdesk or Network Operations Center (NOC) staff.
• Partner Benefits: Using the new MSP dashboard, partners can increase profits through managed services, enable existing MSPs to profitably grow their midmarket offering and allow traditional VARs to quickly introduce managed service offerings.

It doesn’t end here… also new from Cisco this week is the Catalyst 2960-X series of stackable gigabit Ethernet access switches.

New Catalyst 2960-X Switches
The announcement of the Catalyst 2960-X switches provides our customers with yet another opportunity to cost-effectively address their growing business needs with intelligent services. The Catalyst 2960-X is a perfect fit for midmarket customers who are dealing with challenges associated with BYOD scalability and security – many of the same needs as a big business, but with smaller IT staffs and budgets to meet them.

The new Cisco Catalyst 2K switches doubles the scale of the previous generation of Cat2K switches, while adding application visibility, routing options, and redundant power supply options to provide customers maximum investment protection.

“Green” Energy-Saving Benefits

The Cisco Catalyst 2960-X was designed to reduce the total cost of ownership over comparative industry switches with energy-saving features that can reduce power consumption by up to 80%.

How does this energy-saving performance compare with the rest of the industry? For context, IDC reported roughly 230 million comparable switch ports were sold in 2012[1]. Not that we’re being greedy – but if these were all Catalyst 2960-X units, that would mean roughly 14.4 Billion kWh of energy saved.

What could you do with that energy?

• Shut down the Hoover Dam for 3.4 years
• Power all households in San Francisco for 3.3 years
• Make 76 round trips to Mars in a Toyota Prius, 45,000 round trips to the Moon, or 870,000 trips around the Earth
• Reduce CO₂ emissions by 7.5 billion pounds (3.4 billion kg), the equivalent of planting 193 million trees, the same as every household in the United States planting 1.7 trees

The Cisco Catalyst 2960-X switches will continue to make the Catalyst 2K family the world’s most widely-deployed access switch by addressing business challenges of today and helping customers prepare for the future.

This is just the beginning. Cisco will continue to invest and build out our midmarket overall portfolio of solutions and technology across all areas of our business, for partners to get up and running quickly. From the datacenter, with the Virtualized Foundation Smart Solution, to Collaboration, and beyond – we have lots more in store for partners.

It’s clear that Cisco has its finger on the midmarket pulse. We estimate a $25B technology opportunity by FY16 and approximately $5B will be for networking equipment in our core wireless and cloud networking franchise. We have the broad resources and pedigree to lead in this market. We are excited to grow in this market with our customers and partners, today and tomorrow. For more information on the complete midmarket strategy, which includes marketing and channel support, in addition to the portfolio, check out today’s post from Andrew Sage, Vice President of Worldwide Partners Sales,
 

After Taking Aim At The Server Industry, Facebook Targets Cisco

Facebook has made serious progress in its plans to revolutionize the $55 billion server industry and now wants to do the same for the network industry.

The two-year-old Facebook-led consortium called the Open Compute Project has announced plans to create an "open source" network switch.

This could disrupt the $22-billion-a-year Ethernet switch market that mostly belongs to Cisco. Cisco owns over 60% of it, according to IDC.

Najam Ahmad, who runs the network engineering team at Facebook, will lead this new OCP project.

A switch is a piece of hardware that connects different parts of a network and is a central piece of equipment for every enterprise network. OCP plans to make a new kind of switch designed from the get-go for "software-defined networking" (SDN) technology.

SDN is a new way to build networks. Instead of buying expensive hardware routers and switches with a lot of fancy features from companies like Cisco or Juniper, those fancy features are put into software. Companies can then use simpler, cheaper network hardware, and less of it.

A bunch of vendors have already signed on to support the new OCP switch. These include Big Switch Networks, Broadcom, Cumulus Networks, Intel, Netronome, and VMware.

The project also has support from two organizations working on the open source SDN software: the Open Networking
Foundation and the Linux foundation project known as OpenDaylight. Cisco is part of the OpenDaylight project.
The overall goal of the Open Compute Project is to build faster, cheaper hardware for big data centers. Its hardware designs are free for anyone to use and modify.

Eventually, OCP wants to completely change how all enterprise hardware is built the same way that Linux and open source software changed the way software is created.

 

Cisco launches first apprenticeship Cisco training programme for companies

Cisco has created its first apprenticeship programme, delivered in partnership with QA Apprenticeships. The programme aims to "develop a qualified, motivated workforce of Cisco practitioners around the UK", said Cisco.

Cisco added: "The move will give new apprentices the skills to manage and optimise Cisco network systems, handing IT employers a new source of talent to deliver commercial projects and expand their business."

The programme will run at both advanced and higher levels, with the first Cisco apprenticeship programmes commencing this autumn in the south east of England, with applications taken throughout this summer.

QA Apprenticeships, which will provide the training for the new programme, and Cisco recently celebrated winning the Apprenticeship Programme of the Year award from the Learning & Performance Institute for a second year running.

The award was won for creating and growing a bespoke apprenticeship programme for Cisco itself, which has brought over 20 apprentices into the networking and telecoms kit provider to date.

Ian Foddering, chief technology officer at Cisco UK and Ireland, said: “We have been aware for some time about the increasing demand from our partners and customers for apprentices with a strong Cisco knowledge. We are naturally delighted to be able to launch this programme, delivered by QA Apprenticeships, that will develop talent as we have experienced."

The new programme will offer CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) and CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional) qualifications to apprenticeships who take part. These qualifications can also be achieved from other training providers.

Ben Pike, director of QA Apprenticeships, said: “We have worked closely with Cisco to develop their in-house apprenticeship scheme. That they have chosen us as delivery partners for their accredited industry programme cements that partnership."

 

Cisco Connected Industries talks about the IE2000 Industrial Ethernet Switch

Yuta Endo, Cisco Connected Industries Product Manager, discusses the newest version of the IE2000 range of products that addresses the growing trends of Industrial and Enterprise Network convergence; connectivity across Industrial equipment; and the heightened security concerns that are burgeoning.

Yuta talks about the product features and benefits, such as support for IEEE standards such as the IEEE 1588 PTP v2 Motion Control standard.

The product is available now for customers in the Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Mining, Transportation and Energy industries, and is already in use by many Cisco manufacturing customers.
Recently the product line added Power over Ethernet (PoE), so that both the IE2000 and IE3000 ranges have PoE in both the fixed and modular versions.
 

Juniper Breaking New Ground With the World's Smallest Supercore

More Details -
http://www.juniper.net/us/en/dm/ptx-3000/?utm_source=promo&utm_medium=home_page&utm_content=carousel&utm_campaign=ptx3000

Video
http://www.youtube.com/embed/HNXYUJsNz3A?rel=0&autohide=1&autoplay=1


Breaking New Ground With the World's Smallest Supercore

Space and energy are two key challenges faced by Service Providers as they converge and optimize their business. The PTX3000 Packet Transport Router breaks new ground with the world’s smallest supercore, with capacity that is designed to rapidly scale over time up to 24 terabits per second. With this innovation, Service Providers can now install a converged supercore in virtually any space and energy constrained environment. Plus, it is designed to rapidly scale with minimal power consumption.

Meet the latest innovation in the PTX line.



The PTX3000 breaks the mold for core routers with game-changing size, performance and efficiency, addressing practical barriers that Service Providers face in upgrading today’s networks. With the PTX3000, Juniper has redefined the upgrade so that one technician can manually hand-carry and install a PTX3000 within a matter of minutes versus hours.

When compared to competing core routing platforms, the PTX3000 router delivers:

• The industry’s lowest power consumption – up to 1.2Tbps per Kilowatt
• The industry’s most efficient system design - generating roughly 10,000 BTU of heat for a fully loaded system
• Leading capacity-to-space ration at over 0.533 gigabits per cubic inch
• Wire rate forwarding for even the smallest packet sizes
• The industry’s lowest latency at down to 5 micro-seconds
• A precision feature set that ensures rapid time-to-deployment, and high reliability

 

Cisco-funded startup unveils breakthrough router, targets SDNs

A Cisco-funded router startup has unveiled its first product, which the company says implements breakthrough silicon-to-photonics circuitry for scaling service provider networks and enabling them for software-defined networking (SDN).

Compass-EOS this week announced the availability of the r10004, the first in a line of "core-grade" modular routers designed to increase network capacity and speed. The r10004 is powered by icPhotonics, a proprietary technology developed by Compass-EOS that is a chip-to-chip direct silicon-to-photonics implementation designed to provide terabit-per-second connectivity between line cards.

Compass-EOS' patent-protected icPhotonics technology integrates optical and electronic components onto a single microchip to achieve order-of-magnitude Internet speed increases, the company says. Each r10004 can serve as a modular router building block for the deployment of scale-out routing, SDN and network function virtualization, Compass-EOS says.

The r10004 is a 6RU, 800Gbps modular router optimized for core, peering and aggregation requirements. Line card options include 2x100G ports or 20x10G ports.

 

Each line-card features two 1.3Tbps full duplex icPhotonics chips for 2.6Tbps full mesh connectivity between line cards. Such bandwidth can deliver high level SLAs at high utilization rates, improved protection from DDoS attacks at maximum capacity, and congestion-free streaming of multicast video, Compass-EOS says.

The router provides centralized traffic policing vs. distributed policing in traditional routers, which helps protect router processing from being disabled in a DDoS attack, the company says.

"They're making the backplane go faster" through the icPhotonics technology, says Eve Griliches, vice president of optical networking at ACG Research. "Midplane designs limit router capacity due to I/O interconnects. (Compass-EOS) targets the I/O interconnect and makes them as fast as the speed of light."

Compass-EOS is earlier to market with optical I/O than any other router vendor, Griliches says. But Cisco may be working on a similar innovation through its recent acquisition of LightWire.

"The technology is extremely interesting and could be used by any of the router vendors," she says. "If Cisco gets optical I/O they's be in great shape."

For SDNs, Compass-EOS officials say the company has lined up partnerships with developers of SDN controllers to allow those controllers to interact with the r10004 via software commands. Compass-EOS will announce those partnerships at a later date.

The r10004 has been shipping since late 2012 and is available globally. One of the router's customers is a Tier 1 U.S. national cable and Internet Service Provider connecting content data centers in
California and Texas using four 10G Ethernet link aggregation groups to/from each data center, and 100G Ethernet trunks into the core.

Compass-EOS would not disclose the identity of its customers, but cable provider Comcast is also an investor in the company and is deploying Cisco CRS core routers with 100G Ethernet links.

Cisco invested in the company in 2010 and earlier. Compass-EOS has raised $120 million since its founding in 2007, and has more than 150 employees between its facilities in Israel and Milpitas, Calif.
 

Is the Middle East The Next Big Market For Cloud Computing?

As cloud computing technology reaches a saturation point in North America many in the space are beginning to look at other markets to supplement growth prospects. According to IDC, the Middle East could be the next major market to adopt cloud computing. A recent report by IDC expects total spending on cloud delivery in Saudi Arabia to increase 34.86 percent year on year in 2012 with long term spending to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 49.7 percent between 2012 and 2016.

In a story published in the Saudi Gazette, Hamza Naqshbandi, senior research analyst for IT services with IDC Saudi Arabia said, “Organizations across the kingdom have traditionally preferred to manage their IT operations internally, however, there has been growing interest in outsourcing models, with organizations increasingly using hosting and managed services. This growing adoption of outsourcing services is seen as a first step toward moving to a cloud-based model, as companies become more comfortable with the concept of remote services delivery.”

Another great example of the opportunities found in the region is the January announcement from Virtustream that it has partnered with Etihad Etisalat (Mobily), the largest telecom operator in the Middle East and Africa to provide cloud services. The joint partnership will provide enterprise cloud services in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) as well as other parts of the region with a suite of cloud based tools and services. The public and hybrid cloud services will be jointly provided by Mobily and Virtustream and will offer world-class cloud services to enterprises and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs).

“The Mobily/Virtustream cloud platform provides enterprise-class cloud services in the Middle East,” said Dr. Marwan al Ahmadi, chief business officer at Mobily. “We look forward to working with Virtustream to provide our customers with best-in-class enterprise cloud solutions that are the first of their kind in the KSA market.” Virtustream isn’t alone in the market.

Global data storage and network specialists like Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard, EMC, Germany‘s Siemensor Japan’s NEC have also entered market to try to take advantage of the opportunities found in the region. China’s Huawei is making major moves as well. It recently launched in Dubai a mobile cloud center which will provide a variety of cloud and data center services to companies in the region.

Even with signifcant foreign investment in the market, cloud computing in the Middle East is still in its early stages. If you know of any interesting cloud related companies or projects in the region, please post in the comments area below.
 

Juniper Launches Cloud-Based Security Intelligence Service

Juniper's Junos Spotlight Secure service will give businesses greater insight into attackers, threats and the devices used in attacks.

Juniper Networks is looking to give organizations the up-to-date security intelligence they need to protect themselves against cyber attacks on their networks.

At the RSA Conference this week, Juniper unveiled a number of new and enhanced security products, in particularly Junos Spotlight Secure, a cloud-based service designed to give users greater intelligence about attackers, threats and individual devices, and will spread that intelligence across various network and security products.

In addition, Juniper and RSA, the security unit of storage giant EMC, are expanding their relationship through a technology partnership that will result in a high level of intelligence sharing between Juniper's Junos Spotlight Security service and RSA's Live threat delivery service, and using RSA's Security Analytics tool to give customers greater insight into the security threats they're facing.

"Next-generation security must be built on automated and actionable intelligence that can be quickly shared to meet the demands of modern and evolving networks," Nawaf Bitar, senior vice president and general manager of Juniper's security business unit, said in a statement. "This is only possible if you are able to collect definitive information about attackers. Junos Spotlight Secure provides the platform to deliver advanced intelligence with device-level attacker tracking. This integrated approach improves security intelligence, provides collective defense against attackers and delivers true defense in-depth for the data center."

Juniper officials argue that businesses need more than just the IP address of their attackers, but also the devices used in the attacks, and then have the ability to take the intelligence gathered and quickly bring it into the data center and into the network. They are positioning their Junos Spotlight Secure intelligence service as the place where security intelligence on attackers and threats is consolidated and then sent in real time to Juniper's security offerings to act on.

Juniper's Junos WebApp and the company's SRX Series service gateways are the first company products to leverage the Spotlight Secure offering, according to officials.

Junos WebApp Secure—formerly called Mykonos, a company Juniper bought in 2012—is used to integrate the intelligence from other sources that has come from Spotlight Secure, and then lets other Juniper products leverage the intelligence to more accurately defend against attacks. At the same time, Junos WebApp Secure uses Juniper's Intrusion Deception technology to not only profile and fingerprint attackers, but also to misdirect them, according to Juniper.

In addition, Junos WebApp Secure will be integrated into the SRX Series service gateways, enabling the gateways to leverage the intelligence from Spotlight Secure to block attackers, company officials said, noting it will be particularly effective against botnets and large-scale Web attacks.

Along with Spotlight Secure, Juniper also announced Junos DDoS Secure, a distributed denial-of-service protection system aimed at guarding Websites and Web applications against high-volume attacks as well as “low and slow” app attacks. It can either be deployed as software through a virtual machine in cloud environments or as a hardware appliance.

Juniper officials said they will be able to also take advantage of their software-defined networking (SDN) strategy to more quickly bring intelligence to the networks and deploy security services across networks. Organizations will be able to take advantage of Juniper's Junos Space Security Director, which provides centralized management in an SDN environment.

In extending their partnership, Juniper and RSA not only will focus on protecting corporate networks against attacks, but also on bringing greater mobile security services that tie strong authentication with secure remote access. The companies want to get RSA's mobile authentication technologies to interoperate with Juniper's Junos Pulse SSL Secure for remote access to a business' infrastructure.

The companies also want to make sure that the Junos Pulse SSL Secure offering can authenticate native mobile application access, creating a single access point for VPNs and mobile applications.

"Two of the most common requests we get from customers are about improving information sharing and enabling them to deploy greater security on mobile devices," Art Coviello, executive chairman of RSA and executive vice president at EMC, said in a statement. "This expanded technology partnership would enable RSA and Juniper to help address both of those key requirements for customers, and set the stage for increased collaboration on a wider range of advanced security challenges."

 

Citrix opens new Asia Pacific data center

With the Asia Pacific region being the fastest growing segment of their business, Citrix announced this week the opening of a new internal datacenter in Singapore, consolidating previous regional datacenters in Bangalore and Australia. The datacenter has been operational for the last four months and supports 1400 dedicated virtualized desktops, double the number previous supported by the two datacenters this facility has replaced, with plans to grow to support for 2500 virtualized desktops.
Citrix started the planning for the new facility and additional VDI support in January of 2012, with the user migration happening in mid-November. While this sounds like an exceptionally long time for a new datacenter facility on the relatively small scale of this internal Citrix operation there are a number of factors to take into account.

The first is that Citrix set a goal of effectively making the transition to the new facility invisible to their end users. In this they were successful; users logged out on Friday afternoon, and when they returned to work on Monday morning and logged in, they were now running their virtualized desktops from the new datacenter facility, in a completely different country, on new hardware with new network routing. If the process was as seamless as Citrix claims, that alone could merit the extended careful planning and deployment prior to the migration.

The second factor is that this is the first stage in a worldwide, three-year plan to consolidate and update their worldwide internal operations datacenters. The Singapore facility is the model for the future internal datacenter facilities, with their design expected to mirror the successfully deployed Singapore facility.
 

F5 Buys Layer 7 SDN Specialist

 

F5 Networks Inc. is the latest company to acquire a software-defined networking (SDN) startup, announcing Monday morning that it's picked up LineRate Systems Inc. for an undisclosed price.

Based near Boulder, Colo., LineRate offers software for Layer 7 SDN. That is, LineRate Proxy software provides a programmable way to handle traffic at the application layer; the company's website lists policy-based traffic management as an example.

 

Unlike some SDN acquisition targets, LineRate isn't brand new. The company is four years old and claims PhotoBucket as a customer, as GigaOm reported last year. Ironically, the avoidance of "expensive special-purpose F5 machines" was an advantage to using LineRate, according to the story.

 

Why this matters

The SDN conversation has broadened beyond routing and switching to include Layers 4 through 7. Startup Embrane Inc. is trying to specialize in that area, for instance.

 

But F5 believes that those layers can't be handled in the same way as Layers 2 and 3, because at the application layer, the network has to keep track of the state of a flow.

 

As Lori MacVittie, F5 senior technical marketing manager, explains in her Monday blog posting, a Layer 7 operation might need to forward most packets to a centralized controller. OpenFlow (as an example of a Layer 2 SDN protocol) assumes only very few packets will need to be handled by the controller.

 

So, F5 believes a different structure is needed for Layer 7. The company seems to think LineRate has at least part of the answer.