data center

HP’s 3Com acquisition: Vendor market activity spurred the move

HP has made a somewhat-surprise move and acquired 3Com, a venerable but now fallen giant in the networking field, and the move is very likely an explicit a changing of the guard with respect to enterprise networking.

We’ve noted that the control of network decisions is passing to data center IT personnel, and thus that network sales engagement means having IT products in the portfolio. HP obviously has them and is just as obviously now planning to expand its network portfolio.

But we think Brocade’s purchase of Foundry and Cisco’s decision to enter the server space is the catalyst for the move. 3Com has a new data center switch product that could significantly augment the HP portfolio, and also a relationship with Huawei and a position in Asia.

Tapping the China market is likely an early goal for the deal. The HP move could put pressure on IBM, which has been relying on partnership relationships in networking rather than fielding its own product. It may also put some of the smaller vendors in the LAN space into play, including Extreme, and possibly Brocade or Juniper.

Cisco/EMC joint venture: private & public cloud data center strategy

Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a joint venture called “Acadia” to promote a new vision of the data center, built on virtualization and presumably cloud-ready elements. Intel will also have a small stake in the deal. The core of this venture is an architecture built on technology from all three, who form what they call the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Coalition.

The “product” is a set of Vblock Infrastructure Packages that are essentially ready-to-install combinations of software and hardware to support security, virtualization, networking, computing and storage. Acadia will sell, install and sustain this as the customer requires, and we’re hearing they have their first contracts in the bag in Asia and the EU, with one in the U.S. likely coming within 45 days.

The concept is also targeted at both private and public clouds, and in this aspect it could be the basis for something highly interesting to service providers and even somewhat competitive as a service-layer technology. So far none of the players seem to be positioning Acadia as a generalized solution for the service layer, and we can’t find any indication of new products other than element management for the Vblocks, but the value of the package concept is considerable for users whose needs fit in the framework of the three Vblock configurations.

Professional services and a developer ecosystem are also provided; the latter may be where service-layer technology comes into the picture. We think that a service-layer extension to the VCE concept could put a lot of pressure on other network vendors. Ericsson has no real announced strategy, Alcatel-Lucent and NSN have strategies they’re not really opening up on, and Juniper has just announced a major service-layer innovation. All of these would need to accommodate whatever positioning Cisco might make.

Juniper/Dell OEM deal validates rising IT power in the data center

Juniper has announced an OEM deal with Dell that will have the latter re-skinning the MX, EX, and SRX products and offering them as a part of the Dell PowerConnect brand. The deal is a validation of the truth we articulated this time last year: Data center IT is now powering data center networking from an enterprise political perspective.

That means network vendors need an IT hook, and Dell offers Juniper another one (Juniper has a deal with IBM). One interesting slant on this is that Dell has other deals with Cisco and Brocade, and both of those make sense given the strong position those companies have in data center and storage networking. But Juniper is a relative up-and-coming.

Since Juniper made a big deal of its Stratus fabric for the data center at its analyst event in early spring, it may be that Dell sees Juniper as having a strengthening role. Juniper is also a leader in financial applications that require low latency, which is a sector every data center player is interested in. Dell and Juniper will also partner on Data Center Bridging, an extension to Ethernet that provides the lossless transfer that’s needed for data center storage and virtualization applications. DCB is also something that some operators are looking at as a cloud data center service.

Cisco and Oracle look to change data center landscape

Oracle and Cisco may change the landscape in the data center if the companies continue to pursue their current tracks, according to most pundits, and we agree.

Oracle is already the giant of middleware, broader there even than IBM and more focused on making software the premier offering. The Oracle approach to IT is to create a brand around software and middleware, adding hardware to reap the maximum benefit from the sale, but focusing on software (especially middleware) for differentiation.

Cisco wants to ride virtualization and connectivity in the data center, and collaborative applications that link employees, into a dominant position. Cisco’s theory is that owning collaboration could give the company a foot into every application door because collaboration is the broadest of all horizontal applications.

Both companies face competition from incumbent giants IBM and HP, and the big question for 2010 is whether the competition among this group of four will create enough market buzz to build buyer literacy and interest levels enough to create a new technology buying cycle. We’re doubtful that competition alone can do it because competition typically focuses on differentiation rather than project justification. But we’ll have a better idea next month when we complete our enterprise fall planning survey.

Juniper and IBM Ethernet OEM deal focuses on data center

Juniper and IBM have announced an OEM arrangement that will allow IBM to label and sell Juniper’s Ethernet products designed for the data center. The pact covers selected models in the EX and MX lines and is similar to the deal already signed by IBM with Brocade.

The news is very good for Juniper because data center networking is an area where budget constraints are minimal this year and are expected to be even more so in 2010. The Cisco decision to sell blade servers has put Cisco in increased competition with IBM and HP. It’s also true that HP’s switch success worries IBM as much as it worries Cisco. Juniper now has a solid partnership in the enterprise, as it already has in carrier Ethernet with its NSN joint venture.

Juniper/NYSE join forces on data center design

Juniper and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced a joint project to create a new ultra-low-latency data center design that the exchange will deploy in both its NYC metro and London metro data centers. This deal will be converting to Juniper’s new data center Stratus fabric in the future, to achieve a next-level flattening of the connection structure and further reduce latency.

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VMware virtual infrastructure sparks vendor positioning flurry

The next version of VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure, named vSphere 4.0, was announced with a flurry of high-level endorsements from Cisco, Dell, Intel and EMC.

The high-level song and dance can be attributed to the importance of the so-called “data center virtualization” space, which is the host side of cloud computing. IBM and HP, who are both miffed at Cisco’s blade aspirations and determined to carve out their own niche in the space rather than share one, won’t be a part of the big show.

This space is becoming the tail wagging both the IT and network dogs — a relatively small market segment with great strategic importance. We believe that this space was a major reason for the Oracle/Sun deal, for example; Oracle gets a cloud approach and storage, both critical in this new hot area. HP’s new Matrix announcement is aimed in this space, too. IBM will have to respond to the product flood arising from the face-off between HP and Cisco over the critical binding between networking and the data center. That could induce IBM to move closer to Brocade or Juniper, and the question of which way IBM jumps could be critical for both companies.

Cisco’s blade server market entry: Can it work?

Cisco is expected to launch its blade server project “California” today, and there is a lot of disagreement over just what’s coming. Some predict Cisco will enter the data center server market with a hardware product linked to its network virtualization tools. Others think the product will be more Unified-Communications-flavored.

The view that Cisco is getting into the blade server market has been refuted by some Cisco management comments (which doesn’t mean it’s not true, of course), and we believe it would be a major strategic error for Cisco to jump into the data center server market. Cisco will collide with major players like IBM and HP, and the company doesn’t call on IT buyers today.

We’re more inclined to see Cisco going after a different kind of server, something much more like a service delivery platform (SDP). SDP products have existed for a decade, but they’ve been hamstrung by a rather myopic voice focus. Cisco has a chance to create a vision of an SDP that’s focused on voice only as an element of unified communications and collaboration, but that earns its stripes in a value sense by what it can do for non-voice services.

We also believe that Cisco is looking at initiatives like Juniper’s JCS1200 and HP’s ProCurve, the former of which is a product that essentially offloads router control planes to external servers, and the latter is a means of binding applications more tightly to networks (one yet to be truly proven, we’d have to say).

The net of this is that there is clearly a mission for servers to host features and even network control behavior, and this space is pretty vacant at the moment. It’s not going to stay that way, whatever Cisco does with California.

Juniper focuses on preparing for economic upturn

Juniper’s analyst event was a tour de force by any standard, and especially good for a company that has had problems communicating its value proposition in this kind of forum. Juniper related its position with confidence, made effective stories of its new programs and projects, showed empathy with the financial crisis but not paralysis by it, and in all, did everything it needed to do.

Juniper’s most significant utterances on the main day with financial analysts present, were focused around a new Network Instruction Set Processor (NISP) and the Stratus Fabric, Juniper’s new architecture for the data center. Juniper presented the new-gen NISP as a quantum leap in performance, a shift that will characterize the new generation of Juniper routing/switching products. Stratus is a concept and not yet a product, so there was no detail, but it seems clear that it is a new interconnect fabric designed to interface with but move beyond such familiar datacenter architectures as FiberChannel and Infiniband.

Juniper clearly realizes that the data center, cloud computing, virtualization, and other trends are all bring increased focus on how networks and computer resources couple among themselves. The timing of Juniper’s revelation, which promises quantum leaps in performance and latency, suggest that Juniper is deliberately moving to de-position Cisco’s incumbency and its aggressive goals in this space. It’s not clear whether the new NISP is part of Stratus, though it seems logical it would be.

Juniper also announced expansions to two product families, SRX and EX, taking both lines to a lower-end model group. In all, Juniper has made it clear that it is not surrendering to market conditions and will continue to move into new areas to prepare for the upturn.