The Lippis Report

January 29th, 2012

Computer networking vendors have been increasing the speed and port density of their Ethernet switches while reducing power draw and price per port. But while Ethernet switching hardware marches on linearly, thanks to 10, 40 and 100GbE, networking software is taking a different historical path as the pace of compute and network technology evolution has diverged, with networking lagging. Highly virtualized server deployment has broken traditional networking approaches on multiple levels, for example. In response, the industry is now developing a “virtualized infrastructure” or “stack” to add network flexibility. To close the technology gap, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is promoted as the new “organizing principle” to deliver network software and service value. While it will be, likely, years before SDN’s organizing principles take hold, I propose that these two industry activities are inexplicably linked and phased; here’s why…

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January 9th, 2012

During the middle of 2012, a few firms will introduce core switches for campus networking. Many of these products will be based upon merchant silicon such as HP Networking’s A10500 Series Enterprise Core Switch. While these products will boast performance advantage, they will find it difficult to win share against established firms such as Cisco’s Catalyst 6500, thanks to its investment in network services. In this Lippis Report Research Note 184, we explore the importance of network services and their role in campus network design.

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December 20th, 2011

In this Lippis Report Research Note 183, we provide our very popular annual top 10 2012 industry predictions that were provided by Andre Kindness, senior analyst at Forrester Research, Nick Lippis, CEO of Lippis Enterprises, and Zeus Kerravala, principal at ZK Research. We take a look into the year ahead and provide our view as to what will come to pass. This Research Note is based upon the “2012 Networking Industry Predictions” Lippis Report podcast.

The following are our top 10 2012 Networking Industry Predictions.

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December 5th, 2011

The Fall 2011 Open Industry Network Performance and Power Test Report is now available. Since our Spring 2011 test, we added four products from three vendors to the 11 products from eight vendors already tested. We now have data on 15 data center switching products from nine vendors in the new report to be released after Thanksgiving. Our cloud networking test of 10 and 40GbE is now the industry benchmark for cloud networking. In fact, only those companies that are sure of their product(s) enter the test at Ixia’s iSimCity. We found that 40GbE is hard, and thus you have to give credit to the vendors that go through the testing—in this test, those vendors are Extreme Networks, Brocade and Alcatel-Lucent. These firms have high performance data center switching product that is Enterprise and Cloud service provider ready. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we share our the top 10 findings from this round of testing. Lippis Report subscribers can download the 125-page report here, free of charge.

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November 7th, 2011

During the weeks of October 10 and October 31, 2011, at Ixia’s iSimCity, the Lippis Report conducted its third industry test of cloud networking data center switches operating at 10 and 40GbE. In just six short months, the industry has moved forward by breaking all previous records of data center switch speed, power consumption, port density and bandwidth. We added four products from three vendors to the eleven products from eight vendors already tested. We now have data on fifteen data center switching products from nine vendors in the new report to be released after Thanksgiving. During May 2011 Interop, we had eleven vendors provide verbal commitment to participate in this Fall industry test (remember it is free for vendors to submit products to test). As the deadline for signed agreements came, this field of eleven dropped to three because their products were simply not ready. 40GbE is hard, and thus you have to give credit to the vendors that go through the testing—in this test, those vendors are Extreme Networks, Brocade and Alcatel-Lucent. These firms have high performance data center switching product that is Enterprise and Cloud service provider ready. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we share our insights gained from testing all these products and provide the topic cloud networking industry trends taking shape now.

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September 26th, 2011

By all counts, Cisco’s upgrade of the Catalyst 6K via its new Supervisor 2T, or Sup2T, is its most ambitious and thoughtful yet for the venerable platform. The Sup2T is a 2 Terabit (Tb) platform that triples the previous Sup720 performance. Thanks to the support of Virtual Switching System (VSS), the platform allows two 2 Tbps switches to combine into a single 4 Tbps virtual switch. The Sup2T is a major upgrade to the most widely-deployed switching platform in campus and data center networking in the industry. But while these performance numbers are impressive, it’s the new Cat6K’s network services and pricing that deliver most of the value. From a services’ point of view, the Cat6K stands alone.

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September 12th, 2011

Back in November of 2009, I wrote Lippis Report Research Note 136 titled “HP Plans to Acquire 3Com Accelerating a New IT Convergence Era.” In that Research Note, I wrote

“When 3Com is fully integrated into HP what kind of networking revenue and market share can HP gain? ProCurve + 3Com is approximately $2B of revenue now. With the existing product lines can HP generate $5B, $10B or more of network revenue over five years? Time will tell.”

Well after nearly two years, HP Networking or HPN’s North America (NA) layer 2/3 Ethernet switch market share by revenue is nearly the same, bouncing between 5% and 6.1%, according Dell’Oro, with HPN’s Q2CY11 NA switch revenue share being down to 6%. Considering HPN’s limited results after significant investments in sales, channels and marketing, including its “proof-of-concept” plus “A Catalyst for Change” Cisco Trade-in program, not to mention engineering investment, the question is can HP make it in networking? We attempt to answer that question in this Lippis Report Research Note.

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July 25th, 2011

It seems like every week or so there is news of a massive cyber attack where criminals get away with stealing credit card and other personal data on the order of tens of millions of individual records. Sony, Bank of America, Epsilon, Nintendo, the International Monetary Fund, the US Senate and CIA are but a few of the targets for high-profile cyber attacks that took place in 2011. According to a recent study by the Ponemon Institute, “cyber attacks have recently become more harsh and recurrent. At least 90% of the IT practitioners surveyed claimed that they had experienced one or more cyber breaches within the last year, and 89% of these respondents could not identify the source of these breaches.”

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July 12th, 2011

The tech sector is at a crossroads. In just 18 short months, mobile and cloud computing has fundamentally changed business assumptions and technical underpinnings of IT delivery. And in the process IT business leaders are fundamentally changing their buying requirements and corporate IT investments challenging existing vendor relationships. The tech sector served up corporate IT along technical lines of computing, networking, storage and applications, but these lines are blurring as every major multi-billion dollar IT firm now seeks to deliver vertical offerings comprised of a single rack of compute, storage and networking to address scale and simplicity associated with the new mobile and cloud computing models. Cisco, IBM, HP, Dell and Oracle all are repositioning their data center offers to address the market opportunity and shift to assist IT leaders building iBusinesses. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we dive into Cisco’s Data Center Fabric as it’s the furthest along at integrating compute, networking and storage access for corporate advantage offering a glimpse of IT’s future.

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June 7th, 2011

In Lippis Report 172, I mentioned three huge trends that are starting to interact with each other creating a perfect storm that is gripping the tech industry. One of those trends is the creation of a software ecosystem in the networking market, thanks to the Clean Slate program out of Stanford University that has spawned the Software Defined Network (SDN) initiative and open controller protocol called OpenFlow. I spent a week in the Valley talking to people at Stanford and many industry executives from Cisco, Juniper, Marvell, Big Switch, Nicira, Arista, IBM and others. In this Lippis Report Research Note, I share with you what I learned. OpenFlow-based SDN is being both hyped and in its current state, limited, but it does represent a new paradigm that has the industry abuzz, filled with possibilities.

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May 24th, 2011

Three strong trends are taking shape that are so powerful they threaten the status quo of the networking industry. These trends are more like storms than new markets; in fact they represent a major industry discontinuity. The first storm is happening now and is represented by merchant silicon for 10 and 40 GbE chips lowering the barrier of entry for new entrants in the Ethernet switch market. The second storm is much weaker but promises to be just as big, or bigger, than the first. This second storm is the creation of a software ecosystem in the networking industry, thanks to initiatives such as Software Defined Networks (SDN), OpenFlow, Arista Network’s EOS Central, etc. The third storm is the paradigm shift in enterprise IT spending thanks to mobile and cloud computing. These three storms are starting to interact and feed upon each other, forming a perfect storm in the networking industry. The perfect storm is already doing damage, as all major IT firms position product portfolios to navigate through it and prepare for its aftermath of making existing networking legacy.

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March 28th, 2011

In the Lippis Report, we have discussed the fundamental changes shaping a new data center network architecture. These drivers are massive virtualization, a sea change in traffic patterns that are now dominated with east-west flows on top of existing north-south traffic, ultra low latency, the emergence of cloud spec data centers, etc. As a result, data center networking attributes are changing with requirements of traffic, steering in virtualized infrastructure, avoiding manual network changes as VMs move, removing oversubscription (thanks to spanning tree), streamlining network tiers to hasten east-west traffic flows, etc. The industry is responding to these changes and requirements with new approaches to data center networking, such as the Open Networking Foundation, Cisco’s FabricPath, Juniper’s QFabric, Brocade’s VCS, Avaya’s VENA, Nicira Networks’ network virtualization software, etc. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we explore a key technology to enabling two-tier network fabrics, and that’s link aggregation and its various approaches, including Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation Group, Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) and Shortest Path Bridging (SPB).

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March 15th, 2011

Cisco recently launched its SecureX architecture that extends perimeter-based network security to secure modern IT, recognizing the huge growth in mobile and cloud computing. SecureX is a multi-layer architecture built upon Cisco’s AnyConnect client, its global footprint in real-time threat intelligence found in SIO (Security Intelligence Operation), Cisco TrustSec, including policy servers of NAC manager and server appliances, ASA firewall and the security enforcement features of its switches and routers. SecureX is an architecture to Cisco’s network security products and service to work together in an effort to create deeper defenses and contain exploit infestation if, and when, they occur. Fundamental to SecureX is the concept of “context aware” policy across the enterprise, including remote endpoint devices, centralized policy creation with distributed security device and network enforcement. SecureX provides for innovation injection points through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for management and SIEM or Security Information and Event Management. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we explore SecureX with a focus on how context increases defenses and keeps IT assets safer.

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February 28th, 2011

The data center switching market is heating up. To address the scale issues posed by mobile and cloud computing nearly every network vendor is launching its own version of a 10/40/100 GbE fabric to connect servers and storage to the internet. At the heart of this fabric is a two-tier (Fat-Tree) network made up of leaf/ToR and spine/Core switches. Here leafs connect servers and spines connect leafs while also being interconnected in a logical mesh. The protocols to create this logical mesh are based upon IS-IS link state routing, but each vendor is taking a unique approach with Cisco using its FastPath, Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya using SPB (802.1aq Shortest Path Bridging) while Brocade VDX is based upon TRILL (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links). Juniper recently announced QFabric but has not detailed what it’s using for logical meshing. At the center of new data center design are leaf and spine switches. In Lippis Report Research Note 166, we detailed the latest ToR switches. In this Lippis Report Research Note 167, we dive into performance and power consumption measurements plus the use of SPB of Alcatel-Lucent’s OmniSwitch 10K, a new entry into spine/core data center switching market.

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