The SDN meetings have definitely kicked up in attendance (nothing like a $1.3bn acquisition to peak interest!). At the SDN track that’s part of the Ethernet Summit that Matt, Roy and I have participated in for some time, the crowds and content were both up. I again got to chair the closing forward-looking panel, this time with CTO’s from Cisco,…
Matthew Palmer’s discussion of Cisco’s acquisition of Meraki briefly addresses whether one can consider Meraki an “SDN” company. The question raises some important aspects of SDN and the value proposition that I think are worth poking at a little more. To be fair, I’m probably less theological about the definition of SDN, but to me three important aspects are (1)…
What are we to make about Brocade’s intention to acquire Vyatta? It’s a big change for both. Brocade definitely has skin in the SDN game and relevant fabric offerings. Vyatta has valuable networking software assets but historically has been positioned as a “traditional” Open Source play, having created an integrated network “stack” out of Open Source bits (a valuable and…
The modern OpenFlow and Open Networking activities began a decade ago with Martin Casado’s work within the intelligence community implementing improved network security based on flow processing. When Martin went to Stanford for graduate studies he joined with Nick McKeown (his Stanford advisor) and Scott Shenker from UCB. All three were founders of Nicira. New technology ventures are rarely just…
Innovation is a hot topic everywhere. The ONF principals speak of the importance of openness as core to how network innovation can be accelerated, and cite the respected work of Clay Christensen of HBS. What I find personally confusing about the innovation discussion broadly is Apple, the company that unquestionably benefits the most from innovation. Apple is closed and vertically…
VMWorld has started and in the opening keynotes it was mentioned that the Nicira deal had closed late last week, which meant the acquisition was fair game for discussion. At the end of the first day there was an Industry Analyst Q&A with Gelsinger and Maritz, and I got a question in about Nicira. I’ve known Pat since his Intel…
Practical X86-virtualization, as pioneered by VMware, has profoundly changed IT, in a way that no other technology advance has ever done before. Once perfected, the insertion of a thin virtualization layer (the “hypervisor”) is as close to invisible as one can imagine, especially given how remarkably it changes how we can use computers. The success of server virtualization has lead…
The Cisco ONE announcement has something for everyone. There is an OpenFlow component; there is a reaffirmation of Cisco’s support of overlay networks; and then, maybe most interesting, there is onePK, an improved way of “scripting” network administration tasks and an SDN approach you might call “make the most out of what you already have.” That all sounds like a…
