“Cisco’s David Ward gave a talk on “SDN for Service Providers,” which was likely more of a broader shaping up of Cisco’s SDN strategy, and was, not surprisingly, very similar to the presentation he gave last year while he was at Juniper, including the “network weather map” analogies. Points for consistency.”
Plexxi Incorporated - Muddy Innovation at ONS
Sad that he $uccumbed to the siren song because I really enjoyed working with him and hope to again someday, but… Giggle.
“
While Cisco might want everyone to think SDN is years away, reality says otherwise. Openflow certainly has some maturing to do, but there are SDN powered products shipping today.
Juniper’s QFabric is a great example of a fully integrated software defined network. Juniper split the data and control planes in it’s routers eons ago. Distributing that control plane and running it on x86 gear, however is the really hard part of solving both the opex and capex challenges of a datacenter network.
Everything else in the datacenter has changed, except for the network. Solving the datacenter network problem for the next decade requires new physical and software architectures. It’s fantastic to see Stacy and you covering this transition with such gusto. Customers have more choices than ever. The explosion of networking start-ups, merchant silicon, and the rise of the network programer means the network industry will likely look very different 10 years from now. Game on.
”Cisco memo: We can’t build anything — Cloud Computing News
My comment on Gigaom’s article on Cisco & software defined networks
“
Ultimately, Cisco has too many data center network products that have enormous overlap. While there are differences between each of these products in terms of performance, features and even reliability, it’s also true that some of the differences that Cisco promotes appear to be shallow. By filling many niches and flooding competing products into the market, Cisco can dominate all product decisions.
In the end, the time spent selecting products was costly. The meetings, research and discussions included professional services time that added 30% of the purchase price of the equipment.
”Building a Cisco data center network core? Don’t get fancy
Yup.
“Cisco’s GM for core routing biz Marc Randall has left to be GM of Avaya’s networking business. Randall was also CEO of Force10 for 8 yrs”
Twitter / @ShamusTT: Cisco’s GM for core routin …
And he was the #2ish guy at Brocade for a while as well. It will be interesting to see what he can do with Avaya’s business.
“
As we focus on this market transition with the convergence of server, processing capabilities, networking and storage into the cloud, the UCS in the data center grew year-over-year at 122% in terms of orders and 116% in terms of revenues, and is now at a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate.
Even though the Nexus 2000 and 5000 are included in our switching product summary, not the data center, they are obviously tied very tightly to the UCS. Again, you saw the Nexus 2000 through the 5000 combination orders growth of approximately 120%, and revenue growth of approximately 80%. These 2 product lines together, now have an annualized run rate of approximately $1 billion.
We are focusing on all aspects of Cisco in gross margins. With our aggressive focus, you saw the UCS and Nexus 2000 through 5000 combined margin increase in Q1 by 3 points from Q4. We added 15,700 — I’m sorry, I highlighted one extra 0, 1,572 new UCS customers in Q1, bringing the total to 8,983.
”Cisco Systems’ CEO Discusses Q1 2012 Results - Earnings Call Transcript - Seeking Alpha
Noted.
Proprietary Networks: WTF are we talking about?
Proprietary is a dirty word in networking, and for good reason.
Wikipedia defines a proprietary protocol as one controlled by a single company. Customers have seen the damage wrought by proprietary protocols that limit network investments, leading to vendor lock-ins or forcing unnatural technology adoptions and economic behavior. Vendors fling the “P” word at each other hoping customers will be too lazy to investigate. Sometimes it’s justified, sometimes not. How can you tell? Throughout the history of networking, IT proprietary protocols and interfaces can be grouped into three main categories:
Type 1: Proprietary Networks: The worst kind of proprietary: a network composed of devices from a single vendor who is also the only company that supports a particular protocol. The only way to add or extend the network is to add gear from that same vendor. Extracting oneself from a proprietary network typically involves significant changes - and this is the important bit - to the ENTIRE network.
Examples include: Cisco EIGRP, DecNet, and legacy TDM phone systems from Avaya, Nortel, Siemens - the list goes on…
What to ask: If I want to curtail or remove network investment X, what happens?
Type 2: “Pre-Standard” Proprietary Protocols: A potentially nefarious, sometimes benign version. In version Type 2 network, a vendor touts an innovative way of solving a problem while pointing to a pending standard working its way through standards bodies. In this situation, the customer has to make a judgment on whether or not the vendor has the proper incentives to smoothly migrate to the final standard when it arrives. Without proper incentives, “pre-standard” or its cousin “extensions to the standard” can turn what looked like a bleeding edge feature into a Type 1 network (see above definition).
Examples include: PoE , Cisco FabricPath/Brocade VCS & Trill, Cisco Skinny/SIP, 802.11n.
What to ask: How quickly will the protocol become a standard? What motivations and history does the vendor have in migrating from pre-standards to final standards?
Type 3: Embedded Proprietary: Largely benign, occasionally annoying, sometimes carries an economic incentive. In this version, a technology vendor does something inside a device that solves a problem, but does not inhibit the customer’s ability to migrate elsewhere or interoperate with network devices built by competitive vendors. While a proprietary protocol or interface may limit customers to buying certain components for the device from a single vendor, the device as a whole supports the industry-standard interfaces needed to curtail investments in the device or vendor, should that need arise. Power supplies are a common offender, as any cell phone user can attest.
Examples include:Ethernet chassis switch line card interfaces, power supplies, WLAN access points and controllers, and laptop and cell phone chargers.
What to ask: Do the benefits of the system outweigh the initial and ongoing economic costs?
So here is my question: What did I get wrong in these classifications of types of proprietary?
I pulled this directly from this post of mine on the Juniper blogs. Putting it here as the title probably isn’t corp friendly :-) and people freaked out by the size of a Qfabric seems to be clouding the discussion. Putting QFabric aside for a minute, what did I miss?
Solid summary of the state of the network fabric world.
JUNOS vs IOS
I liked this little riff from Glen Kemp on his experience updating a Cisco switch vs his experience with Juniper switches and JUNOS. Tumblr dashboard? Click here.
ssl_boy You know how #juniper harp on about consist features across platforms/version? A Cisco Switch has just proven 2me WHY this is important 4:41 PM Jul 15th, 2011
ssl_boy Customers Cisco core 3750 switch doesn’t support LACP across stacked switches; this forces downtime just to properly connect new servers. 4:43 PM Jul 15th, 2011
ssl_boy I know have to “enter the Matrix” to find which Firmware for my specific 3750 will support LACP properly. This is going to take me hours 4:44 PM Jul 15th, 2011
ssl_boy In perspective; this worked on 9.5 of #junos and exactly the same every version since. My 10 min job turns into a major outage; #thankscisco 4:47 PM Jul 15th, 2011
ssl_boy If anyone is in any doubt #Juniper = Good #Cisco = major PITA 4:49 PM Jul 15th, 2011
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Cisco EOS Dead
dscheinm Hello Twitter people! Resigning from csco. Sad day. Eos succeeded technically, but economically we were still 2 years off. Thank you!! 12:21 PM Apr 12th, 2011
dscheinm 2 reflections on being an “intrapraneur”. 1) finance teams are not VCs. the art of getting them on side is key. 2) you can find grt people 1:36 AM Apr 14th, 2011
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There are a bunch of tweets from Dan, but these two were the news and the interesting. Interesting guy, interesting product and team. I suspect they would have done better in some sort of VC incubation Big Co partnership.
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