Tweet

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.

Market Share Analysis: 2% Growth Comes from Asia and RoW

HP had approximately 6% WW (Worldwide) layer 2/3 Ethernet switch market revenue share with its ProCurve product line before the 3Com acquisition, according to Dell’Oro. Post 3Com acquisition, HPN’s WW Ethernet switch revenue market share rose to approximately 10%, thanks to 3Com’s 4% share contribution, and stayed that way for three quarters until Q1CY11 where an additional 2% was gained thanks to increases in APR (Asia and Pacific Rim) and RoW (Rest of the World) theaters, according to Dell’Oro. In short, HPN’s NA switch market share has been flat since it acquired 3Com. From a WW switching perspective, HPN’s share of ports has also been flat with 20% share in Q1CY10 to 20.2% share in Q1CY11, according to Dell’Oro. In this same period, NA share of ports has been on a steady decline but with HPN maintaining share thanks to gains in APR and RoW.

In short, in nearly two years, HP gained 2% of WW layer 2/3 Ethernet switch revenue market share, all of which came in Q1CY11 and held during Q2CY11, according to Dell’Oro, and is directly attributed to APR and RoW markets. Its bright spots are in routing and WLANs, which increased 2.5% and 2.2% in revenue share, respectively, between Q1CY10 to Q1CY11. Its IPS/IDS revenue share has been steadily declining, losing .3% share over the same period.

Yes, it’s very difficult to gain share in an established market as HPN has discovered. HPN’s value proposition has been grounded as a lower cost alternative to Cisco, a firm that’s greater than 20 times HPN but sells architected solutions.

Huawei Could Shut Down APR and RoW

HPN’s growth is coming from APR and RoW theaters, which is understandable considering that HP obtained H3C, the once Huawei/3Com joint venture (JV) when HP acquired 3Com. Remember that Huawei and 3Com entered into a JV back in the early 2000s called H3C with the hope that H3C could produce lower cost networking products that 3Com would sell in NA while opening up the Chinese market. In Lippis Report Research Note 16, Bruce Claflin, 3Com’s then President and CEO, had hoped that H3C would deliver success much like Amdahl did over IBM in the 1980s and 1990s when Amdahl gained huge market share from IBM in the Front End Processor (FEP) business by offering similar products priced well below IBM.

Fast forward to late 2006 when Huawei agreed to sell its stake in H3C to 3Com. Huawie had a non-compete agreement with 3Com post the sale of its stake in H3C, which has since expired, allowing Huawie to more aggressively and organically pursue the Ethernet switch market. And it has, as in early 2011, Huawie announced a new Enterprise Business Division.

Surprisingly H3C’s massive product portfolio has not made it into the HPN NA channel, partly explaining HPN’s flat NA share growth. H3C’s products were to be HPN’s competitive advantage. More alarming for HP, however, is the prospect that Huawie’s Enterprise Business Division will bring its enterprise product portfolio right to H3Cs Asian customers, cutting off HPN from this bright spot. Also when H3C was partly owned by Huawei, the Chinese government was tremendously supportive of H3C, but since H3C is 100% owned by HP, the Chinese government has no incentive to support H3C and will more than likely shift its support to Huawie when its Enterprise portfolio is ready. The danger here is that in the quarters to come, HPN’s APR and RoW market could start to dry up. Much of the future growth for H3C had been pinned on continuing its China dominance. But wait it gets worse.

Huawie is threatening to hijack Bruce Claflin’s and now HPN’s low cost networking value proposition and use it for its own advantage. First Huawie will more than likely go after the H3C installed base in Asia then onward to NA and Europe. One possible scenario has HPN competing with Huawie as to who is the lowest cost provider of networking. This would push HPN up market and force it to change its value proposition to an architected solution, where it will find Cisco. HPN has started to move in this direction with its recently announced FlexNetwork Architecture. This scenario would, in essence, squeeze HPN between Huawie on the low end and Cisco on the high end. If networking gets into a price war game, Huawei could out low price HPN and that should be the major concern to HPN as it represents an estimated $800 million a year in revenue.

But Huawie will face stiff headwinds in NA as Huawei has a credibility problem with most North American buyers. IT business leaders know it as a low cost provider and that Cisco did a good job of raising the visibility of how Huawei tried to steal intellectual property source code. Therefore, while Huawei could have some impact in NA, the most immediate opportunity for Huawei enterprise is in China, specifically the install base that H3C had built.

Lacking Data Center Network Strategy and Products

HP certainly has product to support one of the most comprehensive data center visions in the industry. HP has servers, storage, a huge services group and network products. HPN’s FlexNetwork architecture is an interesting vision if an IT architect wishes to extend a fabric across an entire campus, branch and data center but the underlying architectural detail and products are missing. The A12500 series has been available for two years, but not in NA in any great numbers. HPN recently said that it will be available in the 2H2011. The new A10500 data center switch was announced in May but is scheduled to ship some time in the second half of 2012. HP’s networking strategy in highly virtualized data centers is limited to its Virtual Connect product. HPN’s data center networking share according to Infonetics, and UBS is estimated at 6% versus Cisco’s 81%. This is where the networking market is at its hottest versus HPN’s strong hold in education and low cost networking.

For a company with the portfolio size of HP and its strength in data centers, it’s curious that HP is the only mainstream network vendor that doesn’t have a good data center fabric story. Cisco clearly does, as does Brocade, Juniper, Extreme, Dell/Force10, Arista Networks, Alcatel Lucent, IBM, Mellanox, etc. HP doesn’t, and it’s surprising, considering its large position in the data center market. It would be refreshing to hear HP communicate what a unique HP data center architecture looks like tied into mainstream industry pain points.

How Can HPN Win?

How can HPN turn this around and participate in an effective way, utilizing its deep assets of broad product line, services, software, support, brand, financial strength and low price points to bring value to both customer and shareholders? Certainly HPN has product but it needs to bring the H3C products to NA and wrap the services group around them. HPN needs high performance and low latency 10GbE and 40GbE data center switching products since 10GbE represents some 25% of the total Ethernet switch market and growing, according to Infonetics. HPN recently announced a family of Top of Rack (ToR) switches called the 5830-switch family targeted for 2H2011 availability, but few details are available. HPN should consider acquiring Arista Networks, which may cost it two quarters of switching revenue but would add between 5 and 10% to its switch revenue and plug a major hole in its networking product line.

In addition, HPN needs leadership consistency as HPN has transitioned leadership from Marius Haas, previous HPN GM who left HP for KKR in May, to now Bethany Meyer, a marketing executive who is interim SVP and GM of HPN. Bottom line: HPN needs to create leadership stability. The first order of business for whomever is to lead HPN should be to communicate what the unique HPN vision is as it’s still not clear to the market. In short, what is it about the HP data center and HPN that’s going to create a competitive advantage over Cisco, IBM, Dell and Oracle other than low cost. For example, consider Cisco’s data center vision, which is very clear. Cisco’s data center business advantage architecture is a system’s approach that bundles products together to deliver business outcomes.

The above is a straight-line approach to winning an established game, but HP needs to do something big and radical that is out of the box but meets market needs. It could consider acquiring Xsigo, a firm that recently released its server-based fabric as an alternative to processing at the network layer. This could be an approach that disrupts what networking actually is in the data center. HP would best be served to develop a compute centric view of the world. Clearly some IT business leaders will buy into this model while others may not, but one thing is certain and that is data center computing buyers tend to be closer to the CIO, offering HP a potential competitive advantage.

HPN needs to develop a new vision for computing and networking, and deliver it via a bold strategy and vision that’s disruptive rather than “we sell cheaper than everybody else.” HP has the brainpower and financials to develop a disruptive approach to data center networking; they just need the thought and executive leadership. In short, HPN needs to lead this industry and not just be a fast follower.

Tweet

On Tuesday Auguest 16th a week before HP’s news of potentially exiting the PC business, Zeus Kerravala, Senior VP of Research at the Yankee Group and Andre Kindness Senior Analyst at Forrester Research joined me in a round table discussion to reflect on HP Networking. We assess HP Networking’s progress since it announced the acquisition of 3Com back in Nov of 2009 and its prospects for the future. In a word our mutual assessment is disappointment with major short and long-term threats from Huawei. But there is hope for the future if HP can create a bold new vision for the industry and execute it. If you are going to listen to one podcast this year about HP, this should be it.

Listen to the Podcast

Tweet

IT business leaders are faced with a great economic shift, while at the same time are afforded the opportunity of a shift in IT delivery models. Business leaders must balance maintaining their current infrastructure, while exploring these IT delivery innovations. Most importantly, IT business leaders need to use their IT budget, approximately 4% of corporate spend, to significantly enhance and reduce the other 96% of corporate spend. But it’s not just an economic calculus that is diving post great recession IT spending. IT leaders need to engineer their delivery to be flexible to support current business growth, ongoing change, and long-term business goals. Robert Taylor, VP of HP Enterprise Services joins me to discuss what he has learned from HP’s global 2000 customers as they emerge from the economic downturn and prepare for a new business cycle with IT.

Listen to the Podcast

Tweet

Networking has become “rigid”. Yes I know it’s almost absurd to attribute inflexibility or rigidity to networking. Look what TCP/IP has done for us. There are nearly 2 billion people connected to the internet and according to the Internet World Stats internet user growth rate increased by 380% between 2000-2009. With 2 billion people and growing online, accessing a plethora of applications via a wide range of end-points there is no doubt that the internet and TCP/IP has been a much bigger success than anyone would have imagined back in the early ’90s. But there’s always a give and take between computing and networking where one drives and changes the other. Right now we are in a compute innovation cycle that’s driving a fundamental change in networking which screams out the need for more flexibility.

Sure networking has increased from a bandwidth point of view and the IETF has added new protocols and network services, but it hasn’t kept up with compute innovation. As data centers pack more compute power and operating systems (OS) per physical server, thanks to virtualization, the need to move containers of OS plus applications and data around have sky rocked. In addition, traffic patterns have shifted tremendously as client-server or north-south flows are layered on top of server-server or east-west flows. And yes, there are new networking approaches being offered by vendors and standard organizations such as Cisco’s FlexPath, Juniper’s Stratus, Brocades VCS, Extreme’s Direct Attach, Force 10’s Open Automation, Arista’s Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation, BLADE’s Unified FabricArchitecture, the IETF’s TRILL and LISP and IEEE’s 802.1AQ, but these may be short term solutions to a much bigger networking problem.

Computing has always driven network design as mainframes drove SNA and analog multi-point wide area networks (WANs) during the ’70s. Mini-computers drove peer-to-peer networking protocols like DecNet, OSI and TCP/IP in the ’80s. Client-Server computing drove LANs and TCP into the mainstream in the early ’90s. The Web drove the internet in the 2000s and now server virtualization and cloud computing is once again changing fundamental networking requirements to make them more flexible.

The rigid label is a powerful one as it creates frustration by not addressing or enabling new business processes. Every time a network protocol or architecture was labeled as too rigid it was replaced and in the process a new market emerged on the scale of tens of billions of dollars. SNA was labeled as too rigid to support peer-to-peer networking. The T1 multiplexer market of the late ’80s and early ’90s was too rigid to support data traffic and thus routing replaced it. The PSTN and TDM were too rigid as they doled out bandwidth in 56Kbs chunks and were unable to support internet and VoIP traffic. The national entertainment network is rigid too as it doesn’t support two-way communications and it also will be replaced slowly but surely.

So where is networking not flexible enough? It’s in virtualized data centers. Some analyst groups estimate that 30% of workloads are virtualized and increasing. Since virtualization or a VM is the new atomic layer of data centers, networking is falling short in public as well as private clouds. Ideally, all resources (compute, storage, and networking) would be pooled, with services dynamically drawing from the pools to meet demand. Virtualization techniques have succeeded in enabling processes to be moved between machines, but constraints in the data center network continue to create barriers that prevent agility, for example, VLANs, ACLs, broadcast domains, Load Balancers, Firewall/IPS Security settings and service-specific network engineering.

The well understood problem is that when a VM is moved from one physical machine to another the network, load balancers, firewalls/IPS, broadcast domains, etc., have to be reconfigured. There is no automation in place, meaning that the network is not flexible or agile enough to make the changes required. Now this problem has scale to it as it’s a growing requirement of both IT executives managing corporate IT assets and service/cloud providers.

There are market solutions available today and more are coming that address “network automation” which enable the network to reconfigure itself as a VM and/or workload is moved within a data center. Cisco’s Nexus 1000V, HP Network Automation software and its Virtual Connect approach, Force 10’s Open Automation, Blade Network Technologies VMReady Network Virtualization, Arista Network’s Virtualized Extensible Operating System or vEOS and others are addressing the problem of network agility or lack thereof in virtualized environments.

But the problem gets bigger and more complex when distance and cloud provider entities become engaged. None of the solutions above address moving a VM from one physical server to another over large distance, be it around town, across state lines, across the country or the globe. Some are using IF-MAP as a registry, sort of like facebook for computers that publish their resources and use this information to automate network configuration to support large distance VM moves.

The problem gets larger yet when workloads move from a private cloud to a public cloud. (Definition note: There is no single definition of a workload, so for my purpose here I assume a container including a VM and associated applications and data that can be moved as simply as drag and drop or some other string of instructions). In short, all the software that is needed to compile and run an application for a set of users is a workload. The network inflexibility problem grows even larger when moving workloads between public clouds.

Now is this a real problem? You bet it is. Consider the value also of portable or mobile workloads to Enterprise and service providers. Workload mobility means capacity on demand, business continuance, and disaster recovery, etc. In addition, as IT leaders explore public and private cloud alternatives, they will want to move workloads from their data center to a provider’s and move the workload back when and if required. For reasons of security and trust, IT business leaders will demand mobility. For example, if your cloud provider goes bankrupt, then you will want to move your workload out quickly. If your cloud provider’s performance drops again then you could move your workload out. If your cloud provider is the target of a terrorist attack or is turned into a large botnet then you can move your workload out.

In addition to security and piece of mind, mobile workloads will fundamentally change IT delivery, capital structure and most importantly business models and processes. Once IT can move workload anywhere in their data center, across their data centers or to a provider they have tiered with, the question becomes when and how fast does IT move workload? If IT can perform all the provisioning in software and enable workload moves to occur transparently and safely with address, identity, security preservation, enabled trust, control and interoperability across providers, then the question is when does IT need to move workload? This level of mobility is an industry-wide initiative as it offers significant and material business value. Business value is created as IT could move workload in a follow- the-sun model, following the lowest cost per kilowatt-hour model; workload could move to avoid a disaster, or for capacity on demand, or for lowest cost of workload execution, etc.

So how can data center networks become more flexible? A key element of the solution is agility or the ability to dynamically grow and shrink resources to meet demand and to draw those resources from the most optimal location. Today, the network stands as a barrier to agility and increases the fragmentation of resources, which leads to low server utilization and prevents portable or mobile workloads.

Tweet

In Lippis Report 151: A Two or Three Tier High-End Data Center Ethernet Fabric Architecture? we detailed the new two tier data center Ethernet fabric that is becoming conventional wisdom amongst business leaders of high end data centers and cloud computing service providers. The networking industry is headed for a major innovation and competitive cycle fueled by a multi-billion dollar addressable market for data center network fabrics. Over the last eighteen months, every major Ethernet infrastructure provider has announced or taken a position on two tier network fabrics for high-end data centers. Companies such as Cisco, Arista Networks, Force10, Voltaire, HP/3Com, Juniper, Extreme, Brocade, BLADE Network Technology, et al have announced network fabrics for data centers with two thousand and more servers that either support storage enablement or not. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we review why it is Ethernet that will be the network fabric of high performance computing or HPC and cloud computing deployments.

For high-end data centers, HPC plus private and public cloud computing networks connecting thousands of servers, a new set of requirements have emerged. Low latency and high performance are the two driving requirements. Yes, there are more, especially when the fabric needs to enable converged storage, but let’s focus on latency and performance for now. Traditional three tier (server access, distribution and core) fabrics designed primarily for north-south traffic flows, that is client-server computing utilized spanning tree protocol (STP) and slower speed Ethernet (100Mbs to 1Gbs). Thanks to web 2.0, mash-ups and social networking sites east-to-west or server-server traffic flows have spiked requiring networks to support both north-south and east-west flows.

As most network engineers know, STP was designed to avoid loops that confused Ethernet as it was designed as a bus topology. STP shuts down redundant links between common switches to maintain the bus. Therefore, connecting access switches to distribution switches utilizing STP would require that network engineers over-subscribe the links between switches as only half of the bandwidth could be used. Oversubscription would also create blocking of packets between points too. To avoid this design, nearly every major switch manufacturer offered link aggregation that is the ability to shut off STP and aggregate links between switches. While this was and is a benefit, the down side has been that vendors only offered the ability to aggregate two links, which still drove oversubscription and blocking.

Recently, industry players such as Cisco and Arista Networks have offered the ability to scale up aggregation of links from 16 to 32, while at the same time delivering multipathing that allows packets to be forwarded across multiple links to arrive at its intended destination. Switch-processing capacity to support these massive inter-switch links have been increased too. These design changes, along with Ethernet’s innovation march, has ushered in the two-tier network design fabric option.

A two-tier fabric is designed with two kinds of switches; one that connects servers and the second that connect switches creating a non-blocking, low latency fabric. We use the terms ‘leaf’ switch to denote server connecting switches and ‘spine’ to denote switches that connect leaf switches. Together a leaf and spin architecture create the network fabric.

In late June 2010, Cisco announced its’ FabricPatch Switching System or FSS and its’ F-Series modules that support 32 ports of 10GbE of auto-sensing 1/10GbE and is essentially for server access and aggregation. FabricPath provides a new level of bandwidth scale to connect Nexus switches and delivers a new fabric design option with unique attributes for IT architects and designers. FabricPath is a NX-OS innovation, meaning that its’ capabilities are embedded within the NX-OS network OS for the data center. FabricPath essentially is multipath Ethernet; a scheme that provides high-throughput, reduced and more deterministic latency, and greater resiliency compared to traditional Ethernet.

FabricPath combines today’s layer 2 or Ethernet networking attributes and enhances it with layer 3 capabilities. In short, FabricPath brings some of the capabilities available in routing into a traditional switching context. For example, FabricPath offers the benefits of layer 2 switching such as low cost, easy configuration and workload flexibility. What this means is that when IT needs to move VMs and/or applications around the data center to different physical locations, it can do so in a simple and straightforward manner without requiring VLAN, IP address and other network reconfiguration. In essence, FabricPath delivers plug and play capability, which has been an early design attribute of Ethernet. Further, large broadcast domains and storms inherent in layer 2 networks that occurred during the mid 1990s have been mitigated with technologies such as VLAN pruning, Reverse Path Forwarding, Time-to-Live, etc.

The layer 3 capabilities added to FabricPath deliver scalable bandwidth allowing IT architects to build much larger layer 2 networks with very high cross-sectional bandwidth eliminating the need for oversubscription. In addition, FabricPath affords high availability as it eliminates STP, which only allows one path and blocks all others, and replaces it with multiple paths between endpoints within the data center. This offers increased redundancy as traffic has multiple paths in which to reach its final destination.

FabricPath employs routing techniques such as building a route table of different nodes in a network. It possesses a routing protocol, which calculates paths that packets can traverse through the network. What is being added to FabricPath is the ability for the control plane or the routing protocols to know the topology of the network and choose different routes for traffic to flow. Not only can FabricPath choose different routes, it can use multiple routes simultaneously so traffic can span across multiple routes at once. These layer 3 features enable FabricPath to use all links between switches to pass traffic as STP is no longer used and would shut down redundant links to eliminate loops. Therefore, this would yield incremental levels of resiliency and bandwidth capacity, which is paramount as compute and virtualization density continue to raise driving scale requirements up.

Designing A 160 Tbps Data Center Fabric

As an example to how multi link aggregation, the elimination of STP, high switching capacity and 10GbE connections create a highly scalable two-tier layer 2 Ethernet fabric, we use Cisco’s FSS and its’ F-Series module in the Nexus 7000. The following details the design of a 160 Tbps switching fabric with FabricPath and the F-Series module for high performance data centers using Cisco’s Nexus 7000 switches. This architecture can support over 8,000 servers connected at 10GbE or 4,000 servers dual homed at 10GbE with attributes of being non-blocking, low latency (5 microseconds), high bandwidth, reliability, plus simplicity of workload movement.

To build a 160 Tbps two-tier fabric, thirty-two Nexus 7018 switches populated with F-Series 10GbE modules would connect servers. These thirty switches are leaf switches. Each leaf chassis provides 256 10GbE ports to connect servers and another 256 10GbE ports to connect into spine switches. Therefore, each leaf is directly connected to each spine with sixteen FabricPath ports at 10GbE equaling a total of 256 10GbE ports for each leaf switch. There are sixteen spine switches each accepting 512 10GbE FabricPath ports. A single leaf chassis connects 256 10GbE ports into a spine equaling approximately 2.5Tbs. Multiplying each thirty-two leaf’s contribution into the fabric yields 80Tbs. As Ethernet is full-duplex, the total fabric switching capacity is 160
Tbps. Therefore, 160Tbps of switching fabric is available across all thirty-two leaf chassis. As 256 10GbE equals 2.5 Tbs, which also equals 16 FabricPath links to each one of sixteen spine switches, yields 2.5 Tbs, the fabric is non-blocking.

As for layer 2 and layer 3 forwarding, the job of the spine is to forward packets from leaf switches at layer 2, creating a single tier fabric. A key attribute of this architecture is that each 16-way FabricPath links are Equal Cost Multipathing or ECMP. What 16-way FabricPath ECMP provides are two benefits: 1) It delivers more paths for traffic to flow, which increases available bandwidth in the fabric and 2) as they’re distributed across all switches, diversity of routes is enabled to distribute packet forwarding. In essence what 16-way FabricPath ECMP provides is a very low latency, high bandwidth approach to supporting both north-to-south and east-to-west traffic flows simultaneously.

While the above is a Cisco deployment example Arista’s new 7500 series of Ethernet switches support 6 Billion packets per second at wire speed. The 7500s can be configured into a massive two-tier network fabric thanks to it support of 32 port MLAG (Multi-Chassis Link Aggregation) affording the connection of 18,000 to 30,000 servers.

Ethernet continues to evolve. The IEEE recently ratified the 40 and 100 GbE standard with vendors such as Force 10, Cisco, Arista, Extreme, BLADE, Brocade, Voltaire, HP et al announcing support and scheduling product delivery. While the above two-tier network example provides the perspective from the large switch provider, below is BLADE Network Technologies perspective, a company focused on server connectivity.

BLADE Network Technologies believes that as Ethernet delivers new levels of speed and intelligence, it will be the dominant two-tier network fabric for high-end next-generation data centers.
For many applications, low latency is a key requirement, and latency is an area where two-tier networks excel. Studies of stock trading exchanges have shown that tens of milliseconds of delay in data delivery can represent a ten percent drop in revenues, and delays of even five microseconds per trade can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Industry-specific requirements for uncompressed data and end-to-end deterministic latency within tens of microseconds make attaining such performance even more difficult. These factors have combined to make raw switching speed a top priority, and today’s best-of-breed 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches achieve can operate with under 700 nanoseconds of port-to-port latency while consuming a miniscule amount of power equivalent to that of standard light bulbs.

As next-generation networks get flatter – driven by latency and bandwidth requirements – emerging Layer 2 technologies such as the IETF’s Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links or TRILL, enable this trend. The idea behind TRILL is to replace spanning tree as a mechanism to find loop free trees within Layer 2 broadcast domains. Using a routing protocol to build forwarding trees within a Layer 2 broadcast domain enables the flexibility and efficiency to route Layer 2 traffic, just like one would Layer 3 traffic, without the overhead associated with Layer 3 packet processing. TRILL will offer important features, such as support for both broadcast and multicast, load splitting along multiples paths, support for multiple points of attachment, and no tangible delay in service after attachment.

In the data center, bottlenecks are moving from the CPU and memory access to the I/O of the servers. Today’s multi-core servers are now able to sustain a great amount of traffic, requiring fast, flat networks, especially now that virtualization is widely deployed. Analysts have predicted that the 10G market will double year-to-year in 2010 and 2011. More servers using 10G increases the requirement for 40G and 100G in upstream networks. With 10G widely available and 40G coming online, Ethernet networks can enable data and storage traffic to use a single wire, using FCoE or iSCSI for example, and provide the raw speed that makes Ethernet with its economies of scale, to supplant InfiniBand for HPC requirements.

The reason Ethernet will be the network fabric for high-end data center networks is that the vendor community continues to innovate and build upon this protocol. Ethernet innovations are many and are beyond bandwidth increases from 10Mbs, 100Mbs, 1Gbs, 10Gbs, 40Gbs and 100Gbs, which are obvious. Link aggregation, multi-pathing and so much more propel Ethernet’s relevance and suitability to new challenging networking requirements.

Tweet

In the Lippis Report Research Note 150, we discussed the new industry group called Unified Communications Interoperability Forum or UNIF and compared it to other industry consortium charted to deliver interoperable solutions. While interoperability is sorely needed in the UC industry, it looks like Microsoft killed its changes of broad industry success before it started. What I hear from both UCIF members and non-members is that UCIF is controlled by Microsoft, and thus, lacks a large cross section of industry players as well as major UC providers. With its current structure, UCIF will make limited headway on its charter. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we review UCIF and its’ opportunities.

There is no doubt that the unified communications and collaboration industry needs interoperable solutions. Video traffic, in particular, is growing exponentially, which will not abate anytime soon. Driving growth is the new mobile video market with devices being equipped with real time video applications from companies such as Apple with its’ iPhone 4.0 FaceTime feature and Cisco’s Cius tablet. There is a real-time mobile video chat for Android too via the Movicha client application. In addition, every major UC supplier will launch a tablet based, end user device this year with tight links into its UC and video collaboration infrastructure. In short, the next generation office phone is a tablet. The combination of consumer and business mobile video device options will drive demand for interoperability, not only between mobile end points, but into corporate video conferencing systems too.

There needs to be a base line of interoperability standards for presence and call management also. Yes SIP or session initiation protocol does provide a base line, but many have built proprietary extensions minimizing interoperability options.

Now is a great time for an industry wide consortium of suppliers, service providers, IT executives and analysts to contribute to a set of interoperability standards with associated certification testing. Before UCIF was established Microsoft drove the initiative with limited to no input or invitation from its competitors. This approach has alienated nearly every major UC supplier from participating in UCIF, and therefore, don’t expect to see Cisco, Avaya, ShoreTel, Mitel, NEC et al to contribute. From this point of view, Microsoft killed UCIF before it even started.

But UCIF can make a contribution especially in the area of real time video collaboration between mobile, desktop and video conferencing system end points. For example, Microsoft could open up its’ Real Time Video (RTV) and Real Time Audio (RTA) codec protocols so that mixed vendor video endpoints can communicate with Office Communicator endpoints natively. With LifeSize, Polycom, HP and Microsoft being the UCIF founding members, their contribution to video collaboration interoperability could have a large impact on the real time video conferencing market.

For example, I use a LifeSize Express 220 video conferencing system, and as a standalone device that connects to other video conferencing systems via IP, H.323 or SIP, it’s magnificent. It would be great to connect with clients that have video enabled their desktop and mobile endpoints too. The larger the universe of potential video endpoints that one can connect to, the greater the value a real time video system provides. This would be a great charter for UCIF, which is to contribute open standards and certification testing that enable mobile, desktop and corporate video conferencing systems to interoperable.

However, for UCIF to deliver on its charter, it would have to dissolve and restart with Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, ShoreTel, and a larger role for Siemens, plus service providers, analysts and IT executives all being stake holders. You cannot have a closed group defining open standards. It just does not work that way.

Tweet

In mid May of this year HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Logitech / LifeSize and Polycom established a forum to develop a set of interoperability test methodologies and certification programs along with specifications and guidelines that enable mixed vendor Unified Communications UC solutions to work with each other. In short, the UC Interoperability Forum or UCIF is trying to define what it means for multi-vendor UC implementations to interoperate. Since its establishment, membership has grown by thirteen vendors, but blaringly obvious is the omission of Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, ShoreTel and other major UC providers. This begs the question of motivation. Is the UCIF interested in interoperability or changing the market landscape to gain advantage on the established leaders? In this Lippis Report Research Note we explore this question.

UC interoperability is a very big deal. In fact, back in early April of this year, Zeus Kerravala, SVP of the Yankee Group and I addressed this issue in a Lippis Report podcast titled What is Holding UC Back?. Our answer was lack of interoperability standards and the vendor community’s minimal interest of embracing the ones we have. The UC market has evolved in a peculiar way as it brings together traditional voice communication companies, data networking firms, computing corporations and software concerns. UC is now at the epicenter of video communications, social networking and mobile computing too. UC represents one of the largest cross sections of disparate markets second only to the Internet. It’s here, within this cross section, that UC gains its enormous value.

UC offers to control real time communications and collaboration. Put another way, all real time business processes will be accessed and control by UC over time. Need to call a colleague? It’s via your UC client. Need to schedule a meeting? It’s via your UC calendar client. Need to video chat with a customer? It’s via your UC video client. Need to bring a group of people together for an emergency meeting? Yes, you guessed it! It is via your UC collaboration client. And common to all those UC clients is presence enabled directory to you, so you can find someone and know if they are available, a communications management system that sets up and tears down connections over intranet, internet and mobile nets. To make UC work ubiquitously, like the public telephone network or the Internet, the vendor community needs a forum or place where it can work out interoperability standards. In addition, for this next evolution in human communications to live up to its promise, it needs motivated vendors to allow their equipment to work together.

Yes, UC does have key interoperability standards such as SIP or Session Initiation Protocol that offer both end-point and communications manager interoperability, but many vendors add proprietary extensions to SIP reducing its value in multi-vendor networks. So the UCIF is to be applauded for taking the first step in creating an organization among the vendor community to usher in an era of interoperable UC. But the problem with UCIF is which companies established its formation. Clearly suppliers are businesses looking for sustainable competitive advantage that comes with large market share and innovative, albeit proprietary technologies. It’s no surprise then that when UCIF is established by firms with limited UC market share one’s mind jumps to the obvious assumption that the founding members of the UCIF are perhaps more interested in market share re-distribution than interoperability.

I’ve observed many industry forums and consortiums in the past that used interoperability as a convenient cause to hide a group’s true intentions. For example, Bay Networks, 3Com and IBM established the Network Interoperability Alliance or NIA in May of 1996 to foster interoperability between Local Area Network (LAN) switch vendors. NIA had limited success in competing with Cisco’s increasing market share gains of the enterprise router and switch market.

UCIF feels a lot like NIA to me. The shear fact that it’s mission statement, board and legal structure was done without any of the UC market leaders input and participation is unfortunate, as it has alienated them. It’s also unfortunate that Polycom and LifeSize are founding UCIF partners, but Cisco/Tandberg is not involved as this has a hint of Polycom/LifeSize fear of Cisco breaking away with the Telepresence market; UCIF seems like a way of mitigating this threat. The timing is very close with Cisco closing the Tandberg acquisition in April and UCIF being launched in May.

If UCIF is not able to entice and recruit Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, and ShoreTel et al in a meaningful and authoritative way, then its fate may very well be the same as NIA. What the industry does need is true interoperability standards so that a Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, Siemens, HP et al UC implementations are able to work with each other in the same way that multi-vendor email systems work with each other. But without full industry participation, it seems that UCIF may be doomed and not able to deliver on its promise of interoperability. For UCIF to be meaningful it needs the UC market leaders full participation as well as Enterprise IT architects and planners plus service providers too, for without them, UCIF is NIA.

Tweet

In Lippis Report 148 we reviewed the major drivers and trends that are propelling the high-end data center Ethernet switch market to well over a $1B annual run rate. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we review the major suppliers of these switches. We review Cisco, Arista Networks Force10 Networks, BLADE Network Technologies, HP/3Com/H3C, Voltaire, Avaya, Brocade, and Juniper and identify their unique positions and offerings to participants in the burgeoning market. Our focus is the high-end, high density 10GbE switches that are enabling virtualized cloud computing data centers thanks to Terabits per second of back plane switching capacity, billions of packets per second of layer 2/3 forwarding, hundreds of 10GbE port connectivity per chassis, a new two-tier architecture, microsecond level latency, low power consumption, non-stop operation and software hooks that eliminate network barriers to large scale server virtualization. The engineering in these switches should be celebrated, as they represent the state-of-the-art in computer and network design. In short, they represent the fundamental building block of a new generation of IT delivery based upon cloud computing and virtualization. This Research Note is a must read for any IT executive designing a data center.

After finishing this Research Note, it became evident that this market needs a set of industry neural 10GbE switch test to independently verify vendor claims. We hope to make such a contribution this Fall.

Cisco Systems Nexus Family of Switches

Cisco’s approach to data center Ethernet switching is rooted in its Data Center 3.0 strategy which seeks to scale server virtualization while introducing a platform to enable a unified fabric or converged network and storage running on one physical Ethernet network. Cisco’s data center Ethernet switch portfolio is primarily the Nexus family of switches including the 7000, 5000, 2000 and 1000v. NX-OS is a purpose built data center operating system that runs across the entire Nexus family. NX-OS integrates a number of higher system availability functionalities such as virtual port- channel (vPC), and the capability to upgrade software without disrupting traffic. The Nexus 1000v is a softswitch that resides in a VM hypervisor. The Nexus 1000v’s main job is to eliminate network configuration barriers that exist when moving a VM from one physical machine to another. To accomplish this, the 1000v creates a port profile including VLAN, ACL, policy, security, etc. with persistence, which moves with a VM as a virtualization administer moves a VM from one physical machine to another.

The Nexus 2000 family of Fabric Extenders (FEX) introduces the concept of a remote line card of the parent Nexus 5000 switches and sits on the top-of-rack connecting servers to the switch fabric. The extender concept allows the 2000 and 5000 to be managed as one switch. This configuration reduces cabling requirements and offers an economical approach to server connection, thus providing the benefits of both end-of-row and top-of-rack deployments. The Nexus 5000 Series is 10 Gb Ethernet and Unified Fabric capable switches, connecting Nexus 2000s and servers directly at 100/1/10GbE/FCoE, while providing layer 2 forwarding. Providing layer 3 forwarding, dense 1/10GbE connectivity is the Nexus 7000 Series. The Nexus 7000 Series is available in a 10 and 18 slot chassis and is Cisco’s flagship data center Ethernet switch series. As a point of reference, the Nexus 7000 is now on an annualized run rate of $1B for Cisco, which is more than 10 times greater than any other switch supplier in the data center switch market. The high end 7000 connects 512 10GbE ports with 128 line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. The Nexus 7000 Series switches can be segmented into virtual devices, delivering true segmentation of network traffic, context-level fault isolation, and management through the creation of independent hardware and software partitions. Overlay Virtualization Transport (OTV) provides customers a simplified DCI solution by extending layer 2 VLANs over existing IP networks. We have profiled the Nexus 7000 when first released and is available here. The Nexus switches can create a two-tier architecture with the 2000/5000, providing server connectivity and layer 2 forwarding between servers. The Nexus 7000 connects the 2000/5000 to each other and the internet/intranet with high density, high reliability layer 2/3 forwarding.

Arista Networks 7500 Family of Modular Switches

Arista Networks is a new comer to the data center Ethernet market, but its management team is seasoned and customer base growing. It provides six fixed 10GbE switches; five 1/10GbE 7100 and the 1GbE 7048 along with the new Best of Interop awarding winning 7500 modular switch. The 7100/7048 switches connect servers in a Top-of-Rack configuration while the 7500 aggregates these switches and connects them to the internet and intranet. This is a two-tier, “leaf-spine” architecture. The 7500 boasts ultra high performance layer 2/3 1/10 Gb Ethernet switching for high performance computing and cloud computing data centers. The 7500 supports 384 10GbE ports, 5.7Bpps at layer 2 or 3, high packet buffers 18GB deep, ultra low port-port latency of 4.5 microseconds and 10Terabit loss less switch fabric connecting modules.

The 7500 is 10GbE port dense, compact, cloud spec fast, green and prepared for 40 and 100GbE, with a price tag 50% below competitive offerings, according to Arista. While the 7500’s hardware architecture is impressive, its operating system EOS, Extensible Operating System, offers another set of uniqueness. For example, all Arista switches run the same binary image of EOS, easing administration while hastening switch feature upgrades. EOS is a modular OS that allows partners to run their software in the Arista switch, consolidating the number of management and network appliances required, thus increasing performance while reducing energy consumption and physical space. Arista’s EOS modularity was designed as a unique state sharing architecture that separates switch state from protocol processing and application logic. EOS is built on top of a standard Linux kernel. All EOS processes run in their own protected memory space and exchange state through an in-memory database. This multi-process state sharing architecture provides the foundation for in-service-software updates and self-healing resiliency. You can listen to a podcast interview with Douglas Gourlay, VP Marketing and Anshul Sadana, VP Customer & Systems Engineering from Arista on the introduction of the 7500 Series of Ethernet switches here

HP/3Com/H3C’s A12500 Core Data Center Switches

HP has spent 25 years building and selling networking products to its worldwide client base and is currently #2 in the market, with a 21% port count share and the fastest growing networking company in the industry. The combined HP/3COM acquisition brings core switching products, the #1 market share position in China, TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System and ProCurve edge switches, representing a new choice for clients who are frustrated by today’s current offerings. HP will combine these two entities and operate under the banner of “HP Networking.”

The HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture and FlexFabric blueprint approach the modern data center with a vision that places networking at the center of an integrated data center solution and accelerates deployment of enterprise services and applications. It is designed to drive simplicity through streamlined network designs and centralized management, enhance agility with high performance security, and accelerated provisioning, and reduce cost with energy efficiency and low total cost of ownership. Central to HP FlexFabric is policy-driven network provisioning tightly integrated with server and storage management in an end-to-end data center converged infrastructure.

HP data center solutions are purpose built, using the latest advanced systems and ASIC technologies. “A” family data center networking platforms leverage a common operating system, Comware™ and are managed with a single-pane manager, Intelligent Management Center (IMC). HP switches make use of an HP-developed technology – Intelligent Resilient Framework (IRF) – to create a resilient virtual switching fabric. IRF delivers geographic independence, distributed high-availability, resiliency and millisecond re-convergence across layer 2 and layer 3 protocols. These innovations allow customers to build a simplified, high performing, highly resilient and flat (two-tier) data center network design. They overcome the limitations of low performance/scale, high cost/latency inherent in legacy solutions, which rely on multi-tier network designs, disjointed platform operating systems and complex resiliency protocols.

A key enabler of this transformational design flexibly is the HP next-generation data center switching architecture. This starts with the flagship HP A12500 core data center switch – which is based on a 100G design that uses a multi-level, multi-plane, non-blocking switching architecture to provide high performance and scalability. The A12500 supports 6.66 Tbps of high-performance switching capacity (future support for 13.32 Tbps) and scales to 2.2 billion packets per second of forwarding performance. The A12518 supports 512 10 Gigabit Ethernet or 864 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single chassis. Its future-proof design accommodates 40/100 Gigabit Ethernet and emerging unified network requirements such as end-to-end FCoE/Data Center Ethernet.

Force10 Networks ExaScale E Series

Force10 Networks was one, if not the first company to offer 1 and 10Gb switching solutions for high-performance computing and data center markets in Fortune 100 companies, Internet portals, global carriers, leading research laboratories and government organizations. It offers a wide range of Ethernet switching and routing products that deliver high port density and resiliency to help customers deploy a high-availability, agile and standards-based GbE and 10 GbE network fabric, while reducing power and cooling costs. Its Ethernet switching products are designed to leverage virtualized data center environments and automate Ethernet networking. For example, its VirtualScale enables management of virtual chassis. Its VirtualControl enables virtualizing logical switching and routing boundaries. For automation, Force10 has developed an architecture, which automates network resource allocation as applications and services spin up and down. This architecture is built upon its HyperLink and SwitchLink technology, two new software features implemented within its Force10 Operating System (FTOS). HyperLink provides real-time communication between Force10 switches and hypervisors or virtual switches to enable automatic provisioning of one or many virtual LANs (VLANs) across multiple switches simultaneously. The SwitchLink feature provides real-time communication with middleware orchestration tools to enable automatic provisioning and management of virtual devices anywhere in the network.

Force10’s modular Ethernet switch data center product portfolio includes the ExaScale E-Series, optimized for core deployments in large-scale, high-performance 10GbE data centers, and the C-Series, optimized for mid-range data centers. Both the E-Series and C-Series come in multiple form factors, run FTOS and are dense high performance switching platforms equipped with redundancy, availability, fault-tolerant operations and many line card options. In addition, Force10 offers the fixed configuration S-Series product line for GbE and 10 GbE ToR configurations. Force10 promotes a vision of simplified data center topologies, using integrated switching and routing in the core, using chassis based E-Series or C-Series products, and fixed configuration ToR access products allowing both 1 tier and 2 tier designs. One tier can be achieved with high density E-Series platform for server aggregation, switching at the server edge, and routing off the same platform to the Internet / WAN. The two-tier architecture can be achieved leveraging ToR switching for server aggregation along with Force10’s chassis based systems in the core. In addition to a large direct sales force, IBM OEM’s Force10’s ExaScale platform as part of IBM’s iDataPlex clustering solution. You can listen to a podcast interview with Steve Garrison, VP Marketing of Force10 on their 40 GbE offering here.

BLADE Network Technologies RackSwitch Family of Ethernet Switches

BLADE Network Technologies (BNT) has been working in the data center switch market since 2006 with much success providing 1/10Gb Ethernet switches for blade servers and top-of-rack configurations. BLADE was launched from Nortel and made up of the successful Alteon Networks group. Their success stems from their ability to identify the top-of-rack and blade switch market in ’06, along with an OEM go to market strategy that included all of the top tier blade server providers such as HP, IBM and NEC. The result is that BLADE has shipped over 8m ports, achieved 25% growth from 2008 to 2009 (in a down economy), owns 50+ % of the blade switch market, is number 3 in the Fixed 10GbE market according to Dell’Oro Group, and has demonstrated scale with at least one customer installing over 16,000 of its switches.

BLADE offers the RackSwitch family of Ethernet switches, which are ToR, 1U high switches. They include the 24-port 360ns latency RackSwitch G8100 10GbE, 48-port RackSwitch G8000 1/10 GbE aggregation and the 24-port 700ns latency RackSwitch G8124 10GbE. Over a year ago, BLADE released its virtualization software called VMready that automates network settings for VM movement ensuring that network settings migrate when a VM is moved from one physical server to another. VMready scales to a 1000 virtual port switch, is based on standards and works with most popular hypervisors.

In addition to VMready, RackSwitch’s unique attributes are found in the fact that they were designed for the data center versus being a wiring closet switch re-formatted for the data center. For example, the RackSwitch BLADEOS supports CEE for unified fabrics, uplink failure detection, virtualization, dual homing for servers, low (80-170Watts) power consumption, back-to-front or front-to-back airflow and very low latency in the 700-360 nanosecond range.

Voltaire’s Vantage 8500

Voltaire has a long history in high performance computing and data center networking as it is one of the key leaders in the InfiniBand market. Voltaire enjoys distribution relationships with HP and IBM, as well as Bull, Fujitsu, NEC, SGI and Oracle. The result is a 100% + year over year revenue growth for Q1 as reported on May 5th. Last October, Voltaire entered the 10 GbE market with the introduction of its Vantage 8500 Ethernet layer 2-core switch. The Vantage 8500 boasts less than 1 microsecond of latency, a low 10 watts per port power consumption and 288 wire speed 10GbE ports in a 15U high chassis. The Vantage 8500’s unique industry contribution is that it’s based on converged enhanced Ethernet (CEE) technology providing InfiniBand-like capabilities to the Ethernet data center. In fact, Voltaire has ported many of InfiniBand’s key characteristics to the Vantage 8500 such as a lossless switching fabric, multi-pathing, virtualization, fabric-wide congestion management and QoS.

From a network design point of view, Voltaire supports a two tier network architecture that enables a simplified, ‘flat’ data center network and puts an end to the era of the over-provisioned network. Voltaire’s design centered on the Vantage 8500 is to support a two-tier data center network that scales from hundreds to a few thousand core ports, which requires high capacity, non-blocking 10 Gigabit Ethernet core switches. By clustering up to twelve Vantage 8500 switches together, IT business leaders can expand their data center to many thousands of servers while preserving the efficiency and price-per-port, without degrading performance or latency which occurs in traditional hierarchical network designs. To support ToR implementations, Voltaire and BLADE Network Technologies announced recently a partnership where BLADE ToR RackSwitches are aggregated by Voltaire’s Vantage 8500, rounding out the two-tier data center Ethernet network architecture.

The Vantage 8500 also features software-based capabilities to address virtualized and converged data center environments. Voltaire’s Unified Fabric Manager™ (UFM) software, application acceleration software and management OS (VT-OS) provide management and performance enhancement tools. These tools were developed and optimized in InfiniBand environments and are now available for Ethernet-based data centers. Voltaire’s recently introduced Unified Fabric Manager™ (UFM™) 3.0 software orchestrates physical and virtual switches delivering guaranteed levels of service per application. It’s the first and only Ethernet fabric management software that dynamically orchestrates end-to-end virtual machine connectivity for multi-vendor, scale-out data center networks.

Avaya’s VSP 9000

During the April 2009 Las Vegas Interop trade show, Nortel committed to the data center Ethernet market with the announcement of its Virtual Services Platform or VSP 9000 switch, which supports up to 27 Terabits per second (Tbps) of backplane switching and 240 10GbE ports per chassis at first release. Avaya announced their commitment to the VSP 9000 and said that it will be generally available in the second half of 2010 while already in controlled availability. The VSP 9000 is built upon the Ethernet Routing Switch 8600/8800 software providing a proven software foundation, mid-plane architecture, a fully programmable network processor unit for flexible data forwarding and carrier-grade Linux.

The VSP 9000 is designed to deliver high-density 10GbE, 40GbE and 100GbE. Its design center is rooted in highly dense connectivity environments that are all mission critical, by definition. Early testing validation of the VSP 9000 promises to provide ultra-high reliability and availability delivering below 50ms failover support, which is critical to eliminate application disruption thanks to its patented hardware failure detection differentiation. The VSP 9000 switch fabrics are lossless Ethernet capable and therefore well positioned to support the next generation Data Center requirements for convergence of storage onto the Ethernet infrastructure.

The VSP 9000’s unique network architecture is found in its ability to cluster four switches together, in that the total architecture exceeds 100 Tbs, with the number of 10GbE ports per rack being up to 720. Avaya continues to invest in Switch Clustering technology (Active/Active resiliency model) such as SMLT (split multi-link trunking) and RSMLT (routed-SMLT), which provides link, switch and router redundancy mechanisms. Three modules are being introduced in the first VSP 9000 release, a 24 port SFP+ for 1 GbE and 10 GbE connectivity, a 48-port of SFP module in addition to a 48-port 10/100/1000 TX module. Future plans include 40GbE and 100GbE interfaces, and even higher-capacity Switch Fabric modules.

Juniper Networks’s EX8200 & EX4500

In January of 2008, Juniper Networks launched its much-anticipated entry into the enterprise Ethernet switch market. Juniper’s focus is on the enterprise data center, campus and branch, as well as the service provider market. Juniper provides a suite of Ethernet switch products, including the EX4200 with Virtual Chassis technology for GbE Top-of-Rack (ToR) and End-of-Row (EoR) data center access, the EX2500 24-port and new EX4500 48-port 10GbE ToR switches, and the EX8200 high-density, high-performance line of modular Ethernet switches.

According to Juniper, it simplifies customer enterprise LAN architectures and advances the economics of networking via its most recently launched initiative called the “new network” for data centers. Juniper’s “new network” promises critical innovations in automation, virtualization and fabric technologies. These innovations are to reduce time to operation by up to 50 percent and eliminate up to 35 percent of data center networking capital expenditures. One aspect of the “new network” is a simplified two-tier network architecture, which may be reduced to one when “Project Stratus” is completed with IBM. The reduction of a three-tier architecture to two is accomplished by utilizing Juniper’s Virtual Chassis fabric technology in the access layer, in conjunction with its high-density, high-performance platforms such as EX8200 and EX4500 in the LAN core, thus eliminating the aggregation or distribution layer. According to Juniper, collapsing the distribution layer reduces complexity in the data center as well as campus networks by reducing the number of managed devices by up to 89%, providing up to 39% savings in space, 44% savings in power and reducing the number of switch interactions by up to 99% compared to three-layer networks. According to Juniper, this approach improves application performance by also reducing latency up to 77% compared to three-layer networks. Note that these claims and numbers are Juniper’s and not mine.

At the core of Juniper’s data center Ethernet product family is the EX8200 line of modular switches. The EX8208 and EX8216 are eight and sixteen-slot modular switches. The EX8216 sports a maximum of 640 10GbE ports and 1.92Bpps and 6.2Tbps backplane speed. The EX8200 is said to support 40GbE and 100GbE interfaces in the future. The EX8200s connect either EX4200 GbE or EX2500 and EX4500 10GbE ToR switches together while providing access to internet/intranet. All Juniper switches run Junos, the network operating system that provides reliability and availability features, developed for the high-performance enterprise and service provider market.

Brocade’s NetIron MLX Series of Switches

In July of 2008, Brocade had purchased Foundry Networks, catapulting them into the Ethernet switch market as one of the top five Ethernet switch/router vendors by revenue. Brocade, with its long history of data center storage, saw that converged I/O was going to happen and prepared the company to participate in this market. At the high end of Brocade’s data center Ethernet switch products is the NetIron MLX-4, MLX-8, MLX-16 and MLX-32 routers, which support 4, 8, 16 and 32 I/O module slots, respectively. We’ll focus on the high end NetIron MLX-32 here, which has been in production since August 2006.

The NetIron MLX-32 boasts a total of fully redundant non-blocking 7.68 Tbps switch fabric capacity. Brocade says that the MLX-32 can forward some 2.284 Bpps of Layer 2/3 packets and support 1,536 and 256 non-blocking 1 GbE and 10 GbE ports, respectively. Note that the new high density 10 GbE was announced the same day as this Research Note was made public. All four NetIron MLX systems are designed for non-stop operation, supporting 1:1 management module redundancy, N+1 switch module redundancy, M+N power module redundancy and N+1 fan redundancy. The NetIron MLX architecture is an adaptive self-routing Clos switch fabric with a virtual output queue (VOQ) design. This non-blocking architecture is optimized for maximum throughput and low latency for all packet sizes.

Tweet

During last week’s Cisco Q3 FY10 quarterly financial conference call, John Chambers, Cisco’s CEO, said something that impressed and shocked me. The company has been quiet about the growth rates for its Nexus line of data center switches until this call. What shocked me was that the Nexus 7000 is now on an annualized run rate of $1B, yes that’s Billion with a B! I remember being interviewed by John Markoff of the NY Times in Jan ’08 about the Cisco’s Nexus and Juniper’s yet to be announced Ethernet switches. In just 27 short months, the Nexus product line including the 7000, 5000 and 2000 represents a $1.4 B run rate of revenue to Cisco. Another insight gained from this ramp up is that the data center networking trends that we’ve discussed here in various Lippis Report Research Notes are powerful demand drivers for Cisco and other companies participating in this lucrative emerging market and its just starting! Companies such as Arista Networks, Force10 Networks, Blade Network Technologies, HP/3Com/H3C, Voltaire, Avaya, Brocade, Juniper, et al, have unique positions and offerings to participants in the burgeoning market. In this Lippis Report Research Note, we review the mega trends driving high market growth. We save a product review of each of the suppliers for our next Lippis Report Research Note.

In addition to the run rate numbers above, Cisco also posted a milestone of 1 million 10 GbE ports shipped, providing a strong indicator that the 10GbE market is nearing a tipping point to high volume, as pricing drops and its use accelerates. The following are mega trends driving this tremendous market growth. Traffic demand drives bandwidth and that’s the first mega trend.

Traffic Profile Changes: Gone are the days when data center networks primarily shuffle asymmetric email messages and low bandwidth client-server computing applications between endpoints and servers. Best effort data delivery, where latency was secondary to delivering data accurately, has changed to being a paramount design element where 10 milliseconds means the difference between losing a customer or capturing revenue. Traffic is now highly mixed, moving around a data center in near Brownian motion between servers, storage, internet and intranet thanks to a plethora of old and new applications such as mash-ups, VoIP, search, backups, storage access, emerging converged I/O etc. In addition to Brownian motion traffic flows and low latency requirements, the volume of traffic continues to skyrocket and shows no sign of abating. Remember when the Dow dropped by 1000 points in early May of this year? Financial services firms saw an average of 40 times the amount of traffic in their data centers as traders responded to the drop. There is no better driver for traffic volume as financial markets in turmoil. The traditional model of over subscribing data center bandwidth by as much as 80:1 is the norm, and IT business leaders are looking for a more efficient model.

Workload Mobility: With the advent of server virtualization IT leaders are able to decouple an operating system from its underlying server hardware and increase the number of instances an operating system can be replicated on a single server. Server virtualization reduced the number of physical servers needed and in the process reduced energy and cooling requirements. Now that an operating system only needs to know which hypervisor it’s running on, that operating system instance and the applications it services can be moved from one physical server to another in near real-time with the click of a mouse, thus providing workload mobility or portability as well as a rapid application procurement tool.

So what does all of this have to do with networking? A lot, first moving these workloads around a data center consumes huge bandwidth and has low latency requirements to driving raw bandwidth requirements. Secondary, and most importantly to the industry, is that networking or should I say the rigid structure of IP addressing/VLANs, etc are impeding the automation of these workload moves. In short, the data center network needs to be reconfigured when VMs are moved from one physical server to the next in the same data center and it simply does not work if a VM is moved between data centers separated over distance, between a data center and a cloud provider and between cloud providers. This is the area of the infrastructure 2.0 working group.

Doug Goulay said it best in his recent Network World post.

“When moving VMs between machines there is a caveat:  if you want your TCP connections and IP addressing to stay intact the receiving physical host must be capable of supporting the same IP address that the VM moving to it is actively using.  This means that both physical hosts have to be in the same subnet or in the same VLAN depending which layer of the network you are looking at.  Since the largest number of physical servers that can be supported doing this is around 64 it doesn’t change the addressing architecture too much, unless the servers are in different data centers, or are connected to different access layer switches that talk to different aggregation layer switches.  If this is the case the network architecture all of a sudden starts dramatically impeding the movement of VMs:  either VM mobility is impeded, or the network is redesigned. 

Some people often ask me, “can’t I do this with DNS?’  In short, no.  DNS is cached at many client sites, ignoring your TTL.  Additionally, DNS is cached on many PCs for the life of an application session.  If you try to change the IP address of your backup server while you are in the middle of a 2GB backup do not expect the connection to continue.  TCP doesn’t work this way.”

Increased Density: It’s no secret that data centers are bursting from the seams as the economic down turn kicked large IT capital outlays down the road until economic conditions improved. Business leaders have been postponing increasing data centers space, that is square footage, while power density has grown exponentially, until very recently, as cooling requirements increase unabated. Power and cooling capacity are the primary constraints to data center expansion. To deal with these realities, IT business leaders are left with only one option, appropriate capital to either upgrade power and cooling systems or build a new data center. The impact of high energy densities is that server hardware is no longer the primary cost component of a data center. The purchase price of a new (1U) server is now exceeded by the capital cost of power and cooling infrastructure to support that server and will soon be exceeded by the lifetime energy costs alone for that server. In short, energy costs are on their way to dominate data center economics.

To help mitigate these trends, the new data center switches offer increased server connection density at lower energy consumption levels. In addition, their own energy consumption to shuffle packets around has been reduced, for some by as much as 50%. To connect an every increasing dense set of servers, new generation of data center switches boast a two tier network architecture to support thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of servers. To deal with high server density connectivity, server access is via a leaf switch, while leaf switches and storage connect to a modular spine switch. The two-tier approach offers efficient connectivity density, low latency albeit this depends highly upon the internal switch design, and is ready to support consolidated I/O.

Consolidated I/O while early in its adoption cycle will go a long way in reducing power consumption of servers as they will have a single network interface for both storage and networking. In addition, consolidated I/O promises to reduce the need for a separate storage switch too again reducing capital, energy and cooling cost.

Back to server density. Server density will only get, well, more dense. If the industry trajectory of cloud computing is realized any where near what the conventional wisdom dictates, then there will be more and more highly dense cloud computing sites supporting an ever increasing number of enterprise, government and consumer applications. How many cloud computing sites does the US need to support all IT applications? With nearly 16 million servers installed nation wide, according to IDC, and with each cloud computing site supporting hundreds of thousands of servers, then perhaps the number of cloud computing sites would be in the hundreds. While its unrealistic that all US enterprises and governments will be hollowed out of their data centers and applications via cloud computing with today’s technology and business control believes; the trend line is clear, there will be a smaller number of very large cloud providers delivering applications to a wide range of customers. Almost like a supernova transforms into a black hole, applications will not be able to escape the gravitational pull of the scale and economics of cloud computing if the industry gets anywhere near this size scale.

The networking industry has been busy adapting to these powerful trends with new internal switching architectures, data center network architecture and automation. Internal switching architectures are being designed with high internal switching capacity in the terabit rage, lower energy consumption in the 10W/port range, low latency and of course high port density. The data center network architecture most are progressing toward is a two –tier leaf-spin approach mentioned above. These switches possess the highest levels of reliability, serviceability and redundancy, as networking is at the center of this massive server connectivity density.

Network automation is another area of investment where VMs can be moved within and between data centers, as well as between data centers and cloud providers, plus between cloud providers. A few companies are addressing network automation, but this is a huge issue that the industry needs to wrap its arms around and provide a scalable solution.

In the next Lippis Report Reseach note, we’ll review Cisco, Arista Networks, Force10 Networks, Blade Network Technologies, HP/3Com/H3C, Voltaire, Avaya, Brocade, Juniper, et al, and highlight their unique positions and offerings to participants in the burgeoning market.

Tweet

By Cisco Systems
This white paper addresses the RF interference challenges that result from high usage of a shared spectrum. It explores the limitations of standard Wi-Fi chip design and how this affects the ability of an IT organization to gather critical, actionable data about the wireless spectrum for effective troubleshooting. Finally, it introduces Cisco® CleanAir technology and explains how by integrating RF intelligence into the network, users gain tremendous insight into actual usage of the wireless spectrum. This insight is critical to proactively managing Wi-Fi networks to support mission-critical and latency-sensitive applications needed in today’s hospitals, distributed enterprises, manufacturing sites, retail stores, and offices.

To learn more, download the Cisco whitepaper.

Get the White Paper

Tweet

By 3Com

The industry is a buzz around Ethernet’s emergence as the unifying data center network fabric of choice.  Although 10GigE is very attractive as a unifying fabric — prices are dropping and adoption is rising — we’re still a long way from a unifying fabric in the data center. According to Nemertes, nearly 63% of organizations have no plans for network storage over 10GigE, while 71% have no plan yet to converge data center switching fabrics into one unified fabric. Standards organizations are still working to address the key challenges of latency, loss, and performance at scale, which are required to ensure that a converged infrastructure performs effectively for all data center applications.   For most organizations, the best approach may be evolutionary – one in which converging parts of the network such as access layer (in-the-rack) help address server/storage I/O complexity with higher performance 10GigE Converged Network Adaptors (CNAs) – makes good sense in the near term. As the enterprise needs for agility and lowered TCO converge with standards-based resilience and reliability, we will eventually arrive at the “data center over Ethernet” (DCoE).
To learn more, download the 3Com whitepaper.

Get the White Paper

Tweet

3com offers a global support network for its customers that are staffed around the world. Their hallmark is flexibility in engagement arrangement and customization of support needs. Vendor transition and product support are two key aspects offered by 3Com so that risk of vendor transition is transferred to 3Com and not the customer. Service and support is needed more now then ever as data center and enterprise network design and deployments have become complex thanks to a plethora of new technologies and options. I discuss the Importance of service and support in enterprise networking with Imran Khan Vice President of Global Services at 3Com. Enjoy, Nick

Listen to the Podcast

Tweet

I believe in IT. Even with all the gloom in the economic news, IT will play a major role in the recovery. This economic mess is not a typical business cycle of supply and demand balance or imbalance. It’s rooted in the greed of a few who sold sub-prime mortgages to those who could not afford them, rating agencies that gave AAA rating to BBB sub-prime mortgage-backed bonds, investment banks that solicited investors to short these bonds only so they could use the short to synthesize and multiply the number of bad bonds which eventually clogged the credit market and ignited the stock market crash of 2008. This cycle of greed has and will continue to cost us, our children and our grandchildren dearly as we are forced to bail out financial institutions, the auto industry and fund a stimulus package sized in the $500 to $700 billion range. With this concerning economic backdrop, I believe in IT more now than at any other time in my career. Why? Because after all the cost cutting, reduction in force or layoffs, supply chain rationalization, expense reduction initiatives, etc., IT is the only tool humans have to improve and sustain productivity gains.

For some this may seems like an odd position as many IT professionals have fresh memories of the 2001 recession that wiped out $5 trillion of IT market value and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. But this economic cycle is in stark contrast to the role IT played in the 2001 recession. In short, IT was the problem in the 2001 recession; it’s the solution now.

In 2001 IT was at the epicenter of that recession. Overspending on IT, thanks to Y2K and the internet boom was the problem. The IT industry experienced 50% growth rates that reversed course to -45% within weeks. Inventories were bloated and IT firms were overstaffed. Skepticism descended upon IT investment, prompting CFOs to take charge of reviewing and approving IT projects. The 2001 recession, in retrospect, was the best thing to happen to IT. IT firms became more focused on delivering business value that was quantifiable in terms and metrics that executive management could understand. As IT firms worked off inventory and streamlined operations their balance sheets became strong with little debt to service and stayed that way.

In 2001, IT was the problem; in 2008 IT is the solution.

Well-managed IT firms have very strong balance sheets and their solutions are designed to increase productivity and reduce cost which will serve them very well during this difficult business cycle. Clearly there is reduction in force occurring across the economy with the latest unemployment levels at 6.7%. Many economists expect this number to rise above 8% during 2009. Note that every .3% increase is approximately 500,000 jobs lost meaning that another 2 million jobs are expected to be lost in 2009. But unlike 2001, IT jobs are in demand, especially those with networking skill sets. So why am I bullish on IT? Because IT is fundamental to productive and profitable business operations.

For example when organizations undergo a RIF, the workload of those remaining is increased to pick up the work performed by those who are no loner employed. While corporations may experience a short-term increase in productivity thanks to RIF, this is seldom sustained without the injection of productivity improvement processes and tools. Along with RIF many astute business and IT leaders are reviewing business processes with a laser focus toward efficiency. Automated and streamlined business processes via IT are the engine of productivity, which enables corporations to sustain productivity gains through RIF and other cost-cutting initiatives.

Larger IT firms will benefit more during the current economic cycle as they possess the resources to quickly deliver change. From an IT industry perspective there is a flight to safety occurring now which will continue during the next twelve plus months. This means that those IT firms with the largest market share and strongest balance sheets will gain the lion’s share of revenue during this business cycle. It’s highly likely that firms such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, HP, EMC, CA, Oracle, et al., will increase their market share during this time. This is not to say that these firms will grow in the current recession, as IT spending is usually two to three hundred basis points above GDP. But they will gain market share over their category competitors. There will be fortune change too between the largest IT players as a shift in IT spending favors the network business platform over legacy IT products and services. The bottom line is that the largest IT firms will be the winners at the other end of this economic cycle.

The Data Center At The Epicenter Of Large IT Supplier Competition

Never before have large IT vendors had so much overlap between product lines. The data center is the new front in competition between IT titans. Data center consolidation, virtualization, and cloud computing offerings will become more and more similar between large IT suppliers. In fact, Cisco is rumored to be planning a server blade offering, which has IBM’s Chairman and CEO Sam Palmisano and HP’s CEO Mark Hurd alarmed. At stake during the downturn is who will control the data center? Will it be applications, servers, networking, storage companies or those that can envision, design, deploy and manage next generation data centers? Web 2.0-based collaboration that integrates video, social networking techniques and unified communications is the second front where Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and HP will clash. While data centers are more about IT cost reduction, collaboration is about corporate productivity thanks to a new communication model for enterprise operations.

IT is Strategic

In the current macro-economic climate IT could not be more strategic as it offers the only sustainable approach to productivity improvement. In fact, for those that invest in IT projects targeted at productivity improvements they could be rewarded with performance increases between 5 and 10%. Let’s think about this for a second.

During the late ’90s in the run-up to the dotcom boom and telecom crash, corporate productivity soared. The reason was IT and in particular the internet and web 1.0. The internet was and still is an efficiency engine. It sought out inefficiency in business models and processes only to transform them and improve efficiency by eliminating human and system delay in business processes.

Clearly today’s corporate initiatives have changed dramatically since August. Business leaders have embarked on systemic operational cost reduction initiatives as well as increasing organizational flexibility, meaning delivering speed and scale of corporate capabilities to address market dynamics. Business leaders don’t have the luxury of patience to gain the benefits of IT projects, which means that their focus and scope is shorter. There is no time for year-long design cycles. So business and IT leaders are picking and choosing big productivity wins. For some firms this may be a streamlining of how it does business with customers, or perhaps reducing the number of product SKUs that make up a sale or making a corporation more responsive to customers and events through collaboration.

In today’s market, IT and the internet with web 2.0 deliver the tools business and IT leaders need to make their employees more productive as they pick up additional workload and business processes are streamlined. During 2009 industrial strength facebook like social networking, which integrates UC, video, telepresence, etc., could become the collaboration interface organizing employees, projects, information and processes via self-selecting groups. For example, all financial professionals may join the corporate finance group as well as various projects they support by posting videos, questions, project updates, schedules, problems, solutions, etc., in short populating and sharing information with the group. This new approach, borrowed from consumer social networking sites, promises to deliver productivity gains by moving workflow faster between employees within groups to speed up projects. In addition to enterprise-based social networking collaboration, we expect acceleration in IT projects that deliver strong business value as long as suppliers can deliver at speed.

All IT Vendors Are Becoming Networking Vendors

At the same time that the global economy is entering a great recession the IT industry is offering a new IT delivery platform – the networked platform. First a word on “platform”. A platform is an infrastructure in which business value is created and maintained. The word platform in the IT industry used to mean a software development environment, which was tied to a specific computing system.

In the 1960s and 1970s the IBM mainframe was the platform. Then in the late 1970s and into the 1980s the mini computer by Digital, HP, Data General, et al., took the platform ring. Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s the PC took the platform title. But during this time frame, a new technology emerged called local area networking (LANs), which connected PCs and expensive peripherals such as printers and file storage together into a PC LAN. This was the birth of the network-based business platform.

It took a few years, but in the early part of the 1990s LANs starting connecting all IT assets including terminals, mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, storage, servers and other LANs over wide area networks via IP. As each of these separate IT segments became connected a multi-billion dollar market arose. The network platform delivered value in two main areas: 1) it increased access to expensive IT equipment for all enterprise employees; and 2) for the first time it provided programmers with access to all computing resources so that data and applications could be shared between mainframe, mini and PC computing. Then in the mid 1990s the internet and email took off and the network platform was solidified.

Today the network has evolved well beyond a connectivity service as it touches every IT device within an enterprise, that being computing, storage, video surveillance cameras and soon facility environmental systems such as HVAC and lighting. With this sprawl networking’s value has increased by integrating security services, power distribution services, mobility, teleworking, unified communications, video services, virtualization services and application delivery services. In fact, the boundary between computing, networking and storage has been blurring with traditional demarcations soon to be redefined. All major IT industry initiatives are now based upon the network platform such as web 2.0, social networking, SaaS and cloud computing. Gone are the days when innovation such as new features to an operating system took the industry by storm. Today’s IT market is rooted in the networked world.

The unique characteristic of the network platform is flexibility, that is the ability for it to deliver business value unique to every corporation. The key aspect of the network platform is that many of the new web 2.0-based applications can be deployed from the bottom up versus top down. Business and departmental managers can easily deploy enterprise-based social network tools to keep employees updated as to project status, for example. IP video including desktop video, video on-demand and telepresence has become an important new IT tool to most organizations, which is now easy to use as it’s linked into UC solutions. These new attributes of the network platform (web 2.0, social networking, SaaS, cloud computing, etc.) will be rapidly deployed during this business cycle as they deliver results and a new IT delivery model.

So what kind of IT projects will address the post-crash corporate initiatives? Those that automate and improve business processes. For example, collaboration solutions that allow organizations to be more responsive to market dynamics by enabling speed and scale of executive decisions and implementations will be most useful. Collaboration solutions based upon the network platform which includes social networking, video and unified communications reduce organizational cost and increase productivity. IP video or telepresence for example, reduces travel cost significantly but more importantly increases decision making and adds value to business process. Unified communications solutions are well understood by the vendor community and can be implemented within months so that organizations can benefit from both reduced cost of communications, but most importantly increased productivity for all aspects of corporate operations, by linking employees, partners, suppliers and customers together, increasing corporate flexibility and hastening decision making.

The role of the IT leader is to review IT opportunities and filter them through the attitudes and initiatives of executive management. As this process of “search for corporate efficiency” takes hold throughout the world economy, many will look back and realize that IT based upon the networked business platform led the economy out of this funk.

And that’s why I believe in IT.