The Lippis Report

Ruckus Wireless is an innovation machine having pioneered technologies such as SmartMeshing, BeamFlex, SmartCast and now ChannelFly. These innovations have differentiated Ruckus in the enterprise and service provider markets with outstanding results. Ruckus is also involved in the IEEE and WiFi Alliance where new Wi-Fi standards such as gigabit WiFi or 802.11ac, and 7 Gbps 802.11ad are being developed. Bill Kish, Ruckus’s CTO, is my guest as we talk about Ruckus’s unique architecture to product differentiation and development. Bill shares his view of the next three years in the wireless technologies. It’s a must listen for network architects in the enterprise and service provider markets.

Ruckus Wireless has been firing on all cylinders. It’s the fastest growing Wi-Fi supplier on the planet in the enterprise wireless market and owns the largest market share in the carrier Wi-Fi space. Ruckus, an Enterprise supplier latecomer, achieved the highest year-over-year revenue growth of all WLAN suppliers worldwide, growing over 134 %, according to Gartner’s Enterprise WLAN Equipment Market Share4Q11 report. For the second year, in the Service Provider Wi-Fi space, Ruckus was identified as the 2011 market leader with a 26.7 % share of Wi-Fi mesh node shipments, according to Dell’Oro. Very few firms can serve both service provide and enterprise market well; Ruckus is one of those firms. Selina Lo, CEO of Ruckus Wireless, joins me to talk about its business strategy and recent growth. Since recording this podcast, Ruckus announced its IPO plans; this could be one of the last times that you will hear Selina Lo talk for 20 minutes on its business strategy until after the IPO. Enjoy…it’s a great listen.

Lippis Enterprises and Ixia are very excited to announce a new test suite for active-active cloud networks at the modern iSimCity plus a more flexible testing schedule. The active-active test is in addition to 10GbE & 40GbE data center switch performance and power consumption test. Vendors may choose one or both tests to submit products. The fall testing schedule will span over three months providing greater flexibility and lab access for vendors to submit products.

The industry is offering multiple active-active protocol options such as Brocade’s VCS Fabric, Cisco’s FabricPath, Juniper’s Qfabric, TRILL or Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links, SPBM or Shortest Path Bridging MAC mode, ECMP or Equal-Cost Multi-Path and MLAG or Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation Protocol. We plan to test them all. This video explains the new Active-Active Ethernet Fabric test and flexible schedule.

In one of the most candid discussions with Jayshree Ullal, Arista Network’s CEO, she voices her view of Software-Defined Networking as not a market but a set of features. Jayshree views OpenFlow as but one in many APIs becoming available to program layer 2/3 networks. If you’re looking for SDN hype, then no need to listen to this podcast. But if you want a realistic view of this important industry trend, then listen up.

There are still many manual steps, such as phone calls and emails between IT teams, throughout the life cycle of a virtual machine impeding timely and efficient VM deployment and, ultimately, the expanded deployment of virtual environments and associated benefits. To deliver on the promise of cloud computing’s on demand application availability, tasks need to be automated. Infoblox has launched its Automation Tasks Board tools in the model of a Software-Defined Network to enable IT department members to initiate with the click of a single button multi-step, often-repeated and time-consuming network tasks while providing cross team visibility and auditability. If you want to build a real cloud computing facility, then you need to listen to this podcast.

The edge network has to be more intelligent to support Bring Your Own Device or BYOD as well as existing wired desktops. But many SecOps groups would rather deny mobile access than allow it due to security threats, thanks to lack of visibility or device, user and location information mobile devices offer upon network access. To mitigate this concern, Extreme Networks launched its Intelligent Mobile Edge Network initiative including Ridgeline 3.1 to provide SecOps context-aware identity information and application visibility for mobile and fixed endpoints entering the network. In addition a new line of edge switches called the Summit x440 works closely with WiFi equipment to increase 802.11n performance and scalability. Huy Nguyen, Sr. Director of Product management at Extreme, joins me as we discuss the fundamental changes in edge networking thanks to BYOD and Extreme’s approach to securing mobile devices so corporations can gain the productivity gains of user device freedom.

Virtualizing a physical network into multiple logical networks each with unique attributes has grown in popularity. This network design is popular in healthcare, education, travel and other industries. Network virtualization was available only to the largest of enterprises and service providers, thanks to its cost and complexity of MPLS and VRF-Lite. But a new approach called Easy Virtual Network from Cisco changes all of that by reducing cost and eliminating configuration and management complexity opening network virtualization to a much larger segment of the enterprise market. In this Lippis Report podcast, I talk with Sehjung Hah about Cisco’s Easy Virtual Network.

The term “fabric” has nearly as many definitions and permutations as “cloud,” so in this Lippis Report podcast Vikram Mehta, Vice President IBM System Networking joins me to discuss the top 10 attributes that a data center network fabric should possess. With the back half of 2012 kicking-off aggressive data center fabric deployments listening to this podcast is a must to help you with your planning.

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.

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.

WAN bandwidth, or the lack thereof, is the single largest contributor to poor application performance in branch offices resulting in reduced productivity and the inability of IT to implement their entire strategy. This is especially acute as applications are increasingly centralized in data centers and video traffic starts to dominate flows all of which put more pressure on the WAN. A new approach to wide area networking takes advantage of virtualization concepts. WAN virtualization promises to reduce WAN cost and increase performance. If your WAN utilizes T1 MPLS links at $300/month or higher and ADSL between $10-$15/ month, then you can benefit significantly from WAN virtualization as it offers 3 to 4 times the bandwidth at lower cost and in the process eliminates WAN design constraints limiting IT business leaders. Keith Morris of Talari Networks joins me to discuss WAN Virtualization. I have first-hand knowledge of how good this solution works; if you fit the above profile, then listen up.

Andre Kindness, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, joins Zeus Kerravala, principal at ZK Research, and I for our annual predictions podcast. We discuss Cisco, IBM Network Systems, Huawei, Juniper, Extreme, Arista, Nicira, Big Switch, Verizon, AT&T, HP Networking, Citrix, F5, Riverbed, Brocade, Broadcom, Meru, Aerohive, Ruckus, Meraki, Infoblox, Palo Alto Networks, Polycom, Embrane, et al, and what 2012 will bring for them and you. Enjoy, Nick

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.