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Ericsson Cisco venture disruptive?
This week bloggers explore how the Ericsson Cisco venture may affect SDN and NFV, data center automation and Extreme Networks' Wave 2 APs.
Cisco-Ericsson partnership may impact SDN and NFV
In a recent blog post, Martina Kurth, an analyst with Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., assessed the Ericsson Cisco venture that's aimed at cloud service provider offerings. In Kurth's view, the partnership between the networking giants might prove disruptive for the software-defined networking and network functions virtualization vendor marketplace, especially if they introduce a new software and services ecosystem for networking.
According to Kurth, Cisco brings a focus on next-generation IP, a trove of enterprise clients and support for legacy infrastructure, while Ericsson's strengths lie in wireless and operational support system domain management. The partnership may be strengthened by successful interoperability, with the two vendors having collaborated on YANG and NETCONF standards in the past.
Read more of Kurth's thoughts on the Cisco venture.
The future of data center automation
Ethereal Mind blogger, Greg Ferro, recently watched a talk delivered at the RIPE 71 conference in Bucharest, Romania, by Dyn network engineer Karl Brumund. The talk covered his experiences in data center automation and its impacts on a small data center. According to Ferro, Brumund -- and others like him -- struggled in their quest to automate their data centers because they couldn't find the products with the features they needed.
Ferro recapped the talk, with takeaway points. In the context of data center automation, Ferro said that white box switches are beneficial, adding that Border Gateway Protocol supports configuration and automation. He also indicated that adding security features to applications, as opposed to using firewalls, saved costs.
See more of Ferro's comments on Brumund's talk at this year's RIPE 71.
Extreme Networks showcases Wave 2 APs
In a recent post, Drew Conry-Murray, a blogger with PacketPushers, took a look at Extreme Networks' new 802.11ac Wave 2 access points (APs). The APs are designed with Extreme's flow-based analytics technology and also incorporate multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO), a technology that enables them to accommodate more users and more devices.
According to Conry-Murray, the Wave 2 announcement gives organizations fresh opportunities to migrate from 802.11n, although the improvements in MU-MIMO will prove most significant for large venues such as stadiums. Extreme's Wave 2 technology will also have a more immediate impact on large Wi-Fi systems in operation at university and enterprise campuses or at hospitals. Conry-Murray leaves readers with an important caveat. Although MU-MIMO-equipped Wave 2 APs are now available, no current wireless client device supports the MU-MIMO standard.
Read more of what Conry-Murray has to say about Extreme Networks' Wave 2 APs.
