Take a Network Break! Grab a coffee, a doughnut and then join us for an analysis of the latest IT news, vendor moves and new product announcements. We ll separate the signal from the noise–or at least make some noise of our own.

This week sponsored by Viptela – Software Defined Overlay WAN that delivers 10x increase in capacity at half the cost and Open Networking Summit 2015, the premier SDN and NFV conference.

Special Event- Viptela is sponsoring a Night of Nerdery with Packet Pushers on Wednesday May 13th during ONUG conference. Its free to attend but you must register in advance.

An SD-WAN evening with Packet Pushers @ONUG | Viptela

This week s show is sponsored by Open Networking Summit 2015, the premier SDN and NFV
conference held June 14-18 in Silicon Valley, CA. To view detailed conference program, distinguished speakers and to register, visit OpenNetSummit.org. Get a 15% discount on registration with the code PACKETPUSHERS

Show Notes

Uncle John Chambers Steps Down as CEO

• Nothing much will change – new CEO is not perceived as innovator.
• Expect more head count reductions, layoffs and internal disruption
• Focus on sales and operations where sales means more sales people knocking on your door and burning shoe leather, and operations means reducing costs, screwing resellers even harder for leaner margins.

Cisco Recruits Surprising Chambers Successor – Network Computing
What Will Cisco-Under-Robbins Be Like? |CIMI Corporation
Cisco CEO Chambers: Retirement Decision 3 Years in the Making
Interview of Everything: Cisco CEO Chambers on white boxes, SDN, leadership and the cloud | Network World

Arista and Infinera become friends with benefits ?

• Arista gets to put its chassis into Metro Ethernet deployments and try to enter that market.
• Infinera gets access to the Enterprise data centre. With chassis switches becoming less relevant in Cloud and Enterprise, Metro markets make perfect sense.

High-capacity, High-performance Metro Cloud Networking

Low-latency Data Center and Financial Networking

Cisco Sells Whitebox to Facebook ?

• well, obviously Nexus 3K and 9K could a whitebox strategy
• evidence is hearsay/rumour, still need some convincing

The Rayno Report: Technology and Investment Trends | Cisco s Secret Brite-Box Strategy

HP selling 51% stake in H3C networking business to gain a foothold in China.

Chinese state-owned firms wrangle over right to bid for HP data assets | South China Morning Post

Rapid Fire

Not Just Cloud & Hyperscale Interested in SDN.

Midsize Enterprise Summit (MES), the largest gathering of Midmarket CIOs in North America, just wrapped this past week. Initial survey data, collected from the 250 attendees, shows the top 3 infrastructure priorities within the market over the next year to be (in no particular order):

• Replacing aging datacenter hardware
• Disaster recovery
• Increased consumption of Cloud services

With their highly virtualized environments (85+%), the preponderance of VMware within the midmarket (90%) and the scale of their environments, Midmarket IT leaders are looking to disruptive technologies such as Hyperconverged Infrastructure Solutions (HCIS), from companies like Scale, Nutanix and SimpliVity, and SDN (namely VMware s NSX) to address these priorities (side note: who says SDN is just for large enterprise and cloud/service providers midmarket SDN is a thing).

The Midmarket heads towards Hyperconvergence and SDN

Load Balancing Is Cool Again (?)

Today, NGINX and Haproxy (another open-source software product used for load-balancing) are most heavily deployed in large cloud providers, as noted in the research:

Digital business leaders with extreme scalability requirements, such as Amazon, Google and Netflix, have found traditional application infrastructures inadequate to support their needs as a result, they have invented new design patterns and techniques to support massive scale.

However, as DevOps principles proliferate into the mainstream and/or as cloud-native scale-out applications are being built, we are seeing increasing mainstream enterprise interest in these non-traditional ADCs including NGINX, Haproxy and Amazon s ELB. These products are increasingly being mentioned in our client calls around load-balancing and application delivery.

A Cool Load-Balancer

Broadcom Tomahawk chipset rollout

• Dell Z9100 Switch Announced
• 32 ports of QSFP that can use breakout cables for 10G/25G/40G/50G and 100G ports in various configurations

Dell Networking Z9100-ON High-performance 10/25/40/50/100GbE multi-rate top-of-rack open networking fixed switch featuring Dell Networking OS9

HP Tomahawk switches.

• Smart rate ports – 1, 2.5, 5, 10 gig speeds. For wave 2 access points
• 10 parallel advanced packet processors per ASIC. Allows for Any order pipeline, much larger table sizes creating foundation for future SDN goodness
• Launch new Visualizer SDN application. TLDR – uses Openflow , captures packets and sends to analyzer

HP New campus switches – HP News – HP Accelerates Business Productivity with New Campus Networking Solutions Designed for the Mobile-Ready Workplace

Extreme Networks – Customer SDN Deployments.

• Town of Enfield, CT
• Mount Mary University
• ODL Based controller
• QoS – Skype for Business use case

Cumulus Networks – 2 Announcements

• Rack Management Platform (OOB switches, managed the same as other Linux-based switches) Developed in response to demand from major customers, this new OS extends open networking to the full rack and allows customers to manage their networks with one common interface and operational model.
• Supermicro now provides Cumulus Linux Ready bare metal, top-of-rack switches for deployment in any scalable, enterprise-class environment. The 1U 48x 10GbE/6x 40GbE port Supermicro SSE-X3648S/SR is available now from Supermicro and its channel partners. The bare metal switch comes preloaded with the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE), enabling simple integration of Cumulus Linux by either the customer or the channel partner to enhance existing deployments or as a part of Supermicro s total infrastructure solution.