The Lippis Report

Featured Download: The Emergence Of A Virtualization Stack For Cloud Ready Data Centers

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Prashant Gandhi, Cisco Systems

In this Lippis Report podcast I talk with Prashant, Sr. Director of Server Access Virtualization Product Marketing at Cisco Systems about the new challenges of managing applications and layer 4-7 services in modern data center environments that consist of multiple hypervisors, a wide variety of workloads types and mobile/dynamic virtual machines.

Featured Download: Which Network Services Need To Be Available In Modern Networks?

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Modern corporate networks are under increasing pressure to support a wider variety of applications thanks to mobile and cloud computing, desktop virtualization plus video traffic having skyrocketed. Not only are bandwidth rates increasing from 1 to 10 to 40 GbE, but most importantly network services are needed to manage and support a different application portfolio mix and network access methods. Network services such as firewalls, WLANs, network diagnostics and monitoring plus application performance acceleration are needed to deliver a consistently excellent user experience. Cisco recently announced an upgrade to its popular Catalyst 6k with the availability of the Supervisor 2T that included re-vamped high performance service modules to deliver these network services. Goyal, product line manager at Cisco Systems joins me to discuss which network services need to be available in modern networks.

Download “A Comprehensive Testing of Cisco Systems Catalyst 6500 Sup2T” report here.

Featured Download: Infoblox Automates Transition to IPv6

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Having a plan to transition to IPv6 has moved way up in the priority list of IT projects for IT leaders as 2011 was officially the year we ran out of IPv4 unallocated addresses and not having IPv6 could cut-off corporations and applications from accessing the internet. In addition employees en masse are “BYOD” or bring your own device meaning smartphone and tables to work increasing the number of devices on the network significantly. These devices and their applications are driving support of both IPv4 and IPv6 as many mobile devices are now set for IPv6 as the default. As dual stack IP v4/v6 is the best practice, the real challenge lies within the domain name service or DNS. Infloblox has developed a range of solutions to automate the transition to IPv6 by supporting both addressing schemes. Tom Coffeen, Chief IPv6 Evangelist at Infoblox talks about solutions to automate the transition to IPv6. It’s one of our best IPv6 discussions.

Featured Download: Brocade VDX™ 6730-32 Data Center Switch

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While the Lippis Report test were being conducted of the Brocade VDX™ 6730-32, Gautam Roy, Product Marketing Manager at Brocade joined me to discuss the firm’s latest product investment. We talk cloud network architecture, data center fabric and convergence with a focus on how the VDX™ 6730-32 Data Center Switch contributes and delivers on Brocade’s Ethernet fabric strategy.

Download “Fall 2011 Open Industry Network Performance And Power Test Report” here.

Featured Download: Extreme Networks BlackDiamond® X8 Core Switch and Summit® X670V ToR switch

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While the Lippis Report test were being conducted of the Extreme Networks BlackDiamond® X8 Core and Summit® X670V ToR data center fabric switches at Ixia’s iSimCity, Darius Goodall, Product and Technical Marketing of Extreme joined me to discuss the firm’s latest product investment. We talk cloud network architecture and what’s unique about the new X8 and X670V.

Download “Fall 2011 Open Industry Network Performance And Power Test Report” here.

Featured Download: Cisco Scales Up Its Data Center Fabric At Industry Setting Levels

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IT business leaders are seeking data center fabrics that scale to support increasing density of physical and virtual servers at cloud spec. In October of this year, Cisco delivered a monster data center fabric announcement aimed at increasing scale, security and new data center services. A few highlights are the second-generation Nexus 7000 capabilities, a new Nexus 7009 platform, plus FabricPath capabilities on the Nexus 5500 and expanded Nexus 1GbE and 40GbE form factors of the Nexus 3000. Shashi Kiran, Director of Market Management for Data Center/Virtualization and Enterprise Switching at Cisco Systems joins me to talk about what IT business leaders will gain from this new announcement from a business outcome and data center fabric design perspective.

Featured Download: Fundamental Changes In Data Center Networking Afoot

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Andre Kindness, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research and Zeus Kerravala, principal at ZK Research join me to discuss the shift-taking place in data center networking. Data Center networking is at an inflection point thanks to industry transitions driving new economics, technologies and IT delivery via mobile and cloud computing. These market transitions happen only once every decade or so and we detail its dynamics in this industry analyst round table. We discuss virtualization, merchant silicon, software defined networking, the rise of best of breed products, what network designs are working and which aren’t. We end with how IT business leaders can navigate an industry is transition.

Featured Download: The Lippis Report App for iPhone Now Available

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We have a new app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch available on the App Store. Now you can get all of your favorite Lippis Report content in a native app on your iOS device. The app features:

• Update Notifications, so you’ll be alerted when a new Research Note or download is available.
• Easy sorting by download type, so you can get just the type of content you want, when you want it.
• Listen to all of the latest Podcasts directly on your iDevice.
• Read our white papers and Research Notes.
• Watch the latest videos from the Lippis Report.
• Easily share content via your Twitter, Facebook or Email account.

Follow the link above for the free download.

Featured Download: 10GbE DC Fabric Test Vendor Announcement

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Nick Lippis of the Lippis Report announces the participating vendors in the 10GbE Data Center Network Fabric test at the iSimCity lab during the week of Dec 6-10, 2010.  Watch it here

Featured Download: An Open Industry Network Performance Test Evaluating 10 Gigabit Ethernet Switching Prospectus

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Our industry is ramping up to build private and public cloud infrastructure, but IT architects do not have comparative 10Gigabit Ethernet Switch performance information to assist them in purchase decisions and product differentiation. New data center Ethernet fabric network design requires low latency, high performance under north-south plus east-west flows, low power consumption and minimum number of network tiers. During past industry cycles open industry tests contributed to growing the network market by shortening sales cycles due to the elimination of IT departments conducting internal performance test. In addition, performance question obstacles were eliminated during the sales cycle thanks to reliable industry data being available, speeding up market adoption. This was true in the LAN plus bridge/router industry battles as well as every major Ethernet switch evolution. There is no broad industry comparative 10GE modular switch performance test available.

Lippis Enterprises has developed a series of open industry performance tests and teamed with Ixia for their execution. The goal of the test is to provide the industry with comparative performance test data across all 10Gigabit Ethernet switch providers. While the main test is focused on modular switching products, fixed configuration switches are welcome too. The final test report will profile each supplier and segment products based upon modular or fixed configuration.

Download the prospectus now and sign up while there’s still room

Featured Download: Nortel Liquidates & Industry Moves On

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Zeus Kerravala of Yankee joins me to discuss the many changes occurring in the industry including Nortel’s liquidation and Cisco’s huge influence over the industry as it reshapes to respond to its UCS and data center 3.0 initiatives. We discuss HP’s new relationships with MSFT and Alcatel-Lucent, Brocade, Enterasys, Extreme, Force10, IBM, Juniper, and much more. We talk winners and losers and provide insight into the major trends that are focusing on new corporate IT buying behavior. Enjoy.

Featured Download: Cisco’s WAN Advantage

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Along with a turbulent macro economic cycle comes business rationalization and in networking the wide area offers a unique opportunity to deliver value both in terms of operational efficiency and business initiative alignment. The branch WAN as been pieced together usually site by site without a comprehensive plan as branches are connected with inconsistent WAN Services. IT planners are being offered an opportunity to implement a common set of WAN Services embedded within routers such as UC, WAN optimization, security etc., which promise to lower operational spend, align business initiatives and policy while delivering Local Area Networks (LANs) like application performance over the WAN. Tere’ Bracco Senior Marketing Manager for Network Systems and Security at Cisco joins me to discuss Cisco’s new WAN Advantage initiative that delivers a common set of WAN Services between ASR and ISR routers.

Featured Download: Can Collaboration Deliver a $100 Billion Stimulus Package in 2009?

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By Cisco Systems

In this ten-minute video (64MB download) with Alan Cohen, Cisco’s VP of Enterprise Solutions, he makes the strong argument that collaboration solutions can deliver $100B worth of stimulus through productivity gains and cost avoidance. Alan also builds upon this argument in a two-part blog found here:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2

Featured Download: Lippis and Kerravala on Cisco’s Unified Computing, Nortel’s bankruptcy and more

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While world governments figure out how to save the banking system our industry is changing at a pace I haven’t seen since the mid-1990s. Nortel is bankrupt, Cisco is making a huge announcement the week of March 15th, Force10 and Turnin have merged, Cisco launched EnergyWise, HP ProCurve launched ProCurve One, Juniper announced its EX2500 and Stratus, Brocade extended its DCX backbone, Mallanox launched a converged fabric gateway. IBM is getting close to Juniper while HP TSG fortifies its data center position with EDS services, etc. Zeus Kerravala, Senior VP, Global Enterprise Research for the Yankee Group joins me to discuss the blizzard of announcements and changes taking place in our industry and offer our opinions and guidance on how to make sense of an industry in fundamental change.