Intel has big plans in the networking –plans that will upset the status quo from merchant silicon vendors like Broadcom to box makers like Cisco and Juniper who are dependent on custom ASICs. Read more »
The networking world is undergoing an epic disruption brought about by Open Flow and software defined networking. At the Open Networking Summit, we can see how the ecosystem has changed in a mere 18 months. Read more »
Amazon’s chief vows to keep up the AWS feature race; OpenStack gets two more big backers as vendors cue up news for the OpenStack Summit. Read more »
The IT industry is undergoing a cataclysm of innovation that is disrupting big businesses, offering opportunities for entrepreneurs and redefining the role of IT in the corporation. GigaOM’s Structure event helps you understand what’s next. Read more »
The mobile platform wars escalated once again in the first quarter of 2012 as BlackBerry finally took the wraps off its much-anticipated new operating system. Meanwhile Android continued to build on its dominance both worldwide and in the U.S., cementing a two-horse race with Apple. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
CloudFlare’s web security service suffered an hour-long outage after the company tried to respond to a DDoS attack on one of its customers. Read more »
With all the excitement around software-defined networking, most people forget that OpenFlow, which helped jump start that conversation, is more than just virtualization. It’s the creation of a common hardware platform that will commoditize the router. Read more »
The threat of software-defined networking has prompted Juniper to revamp its business model — switching from a hardware-based model to one more familiar in enterprise software. It has also unveiled an SDN strategy that preserves the importance of specialty hardware at the lowest level of the network. Read more »
Juniper will spend up to $176 million on stealthy software-defined networking startup Contrail. The move coming just weeks after Cisco’s own SDN buy and months after VMware’s $1.3 billion grab for Nicira show how aggressively the established vendors are about staking a claim. Read more »
The growth of public and private cloud services places new demands on the IT organization, particularly when it comes to the scale, agility and management of the data center. SDNs are a response to those demands, providing opportunities for IT managers to improve their network operations. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The software-defined networking (SDN) market is expected to soar in size to $2 billion by 2016, according to IDC. Growth this fast may very well signify that SDN is the third epoch of computer networking, creating vendor discontinuities and a new IT order. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
VMware’s planned acquisition of Nicra for $1.25 billion represents the evolution of networking beyond the hardware-dominated point of view that has sustained the industry for decades. Here’s what that means for startups in the networking realm as well as for the industry giants. Read more »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Juniper, one of the big technology vendors in the crosshairs of the revolution occurring in the networking industry has finally decided to tell its story around the rise of software defined networking and OpenFlow. It’s going to have to walk a fine line. Read more »
Facebook is rethinking how it does networking, as Wired reports, but it’s actually rethinking the entire composition of the data center. Its plans will destroy the servers, switches and storage boxes vendors sell today in an effort to operate efficiently at web scale. Read more »
Huawei, six months after creating its enterprise networking division here in the U.S. is ready to make a big splash at Interop this year. The Chinese networking gear maker is the one thing Cisco’s CEO John Chambers fears and today’s announcements show why. Read more »
Continuing a yearlong trend, the fourth quarter in big IT was all about big data, and Hadoop in particular. Still, many are beginning to recognize the software framework’s shortcomings, which is why this quarter also saw more attention for startups claiming easy analytics and real-time processing. Elsewhere in infrastructure, SaaS startups made out well and valuations for these companies are getting higher, and naturally there was news from the AWS camp. This quarterly wrap-up examines these events and more, including the quarter’s dark spot, the hike in prices in the hard-drive manufacturing space due to the floods in Thailand. Companies mentioned in this report include Calxeda, Heroku, Rackspace, Salesforce.com and Tier3. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Embrane, the not-so-stealthy startup that’s one of several hoping to make it big on the concept of virtualizing the network, launched Sunday. The company, founded in 2010 by Dante Malagrinò, has raised $27 million to provide firewalls, load balancers and more via distributed software. Read more »
The mobile industry is in trouble. Its networks are expensive to run. Retail customers want cheap pipes. At a conference Wednesday, a Verizon executive detailed the problem and explained how he wants to use OpenFlow and software-defined networking to lower his costs. Read more »
Qwilt is coming to market with a product to help network operators manage huge amounts of video traveling over their networks. It’s doing so with some serious backing from big-name investors, having raised $24 million from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Crescent Point Group and others. Read more »
Nicira, the not-so-stealthy startup working in the network virtualization space was “outed” Monday by the New York Times as a secret startup pursuing the next hot trend in computing. But the article overstated Nicira’s secretiveness and perhaps its role as network virtualization hits the mainstream. Read more »
Dome9, a stealth company that aims to create the equivalent of a firewall for public and private clouds, launched the company and its product Monday. The company, which was founded last year, is just one of several cloud security companies coming out of stealth mode. Read more »
The buzz around OpenFlow is increasing with a few case studies out last month, some fundings and a new beta product from a vendor pushing a software-defined network controller. And now there’s a developing programming language for virtualized networks, called Frenetic. Read more »
The world of networking is changing, thanks to shifting traffic patterns, more widely distributed webscale systems and the economic need for the networking world to catch up to where the computing and server world is today. This trend toward networking virtualization has huge implications for vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista, Dell and Intel, but it also could become the foundation for an entire new ecosystem of startups and value creation, much like what the creation of the hypervisor did for computing. In this research note we look at what network virtualization is, why we’re moving toward it, what OpenFlow is and what the opportunities are for companies, both large and small, beyond that technology. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Facebook, SeaMicro and Zynga. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The shift in networking and the hype around the OpenFlow protocol has led to a a lot of confusion and overinflation of what OpenFlow can do. To get a bit more grounded in reality, I spoke with NEC about what its customers are doing. Read more »
OpenFlow may be one of the hotter buzzwords these days, but getting past the exuberance and down to brass tacks can be difficult because the technology can be applied many places. It also sprouts up in new contexts as the ecosystem around the technology expands. Read more »
On Wednesday Dell said it would buy networking-gear-maker company Force10 Networks. The move was expected since Dell’s rivals in the server space have tied up their networking equipment buys after Cisco launched servers that combined computing and networking in one box. Read more »
Intel has purchased an Ethernet silicon company in a move that mimics the industry trend toward viewing the data center as the computer as computing becomes more distributed. Intel said on Tuesday it would buy Fulcrum Microsystems, a venture-backed company that’s 11 years old. Read more »
Networking is about to change. It is inevitable that an open-source hardware architecture for the large chassis switch gets released, likely driven by a consortium of large customers. When combined with the external software control enabled by OpenFlow, this will really shake things up. Read more »
Health care and stock trading has led to a need for new forms of cloud networking, which are growing much quicker than good old enterprise networking. However, cloud networking needs to have low latencies, and it needs new forms of control, because speed alone doesn’t help. Read more »
In five short years, cloud computing has gone from being a quaint technology to a major catchphrase. Amazon and others are now moving at Internet speed, trying to offer better security, faster networking, more compliance and a host of other products that are attempting to meet the demands of startups, consumers and enterprises alike. On GigaOM’s Structure channel, we cover the gear and software that comprises the cloud, the services and the people who are changing the industry. Now for the first time, we’ve decided to condense that knowledge into the Structure 50, a list of the 50 companies that are influencing how the cloud and infrastructure evolves. All of these players, big or small, have people, technology or strategies that will help shape the way the cloud market is developing and where it will eventually end up. Companies mentioned in this report include Amazon, Rackspace, Cloudera, China Telecom and SeaMicro. For a full list of companies, and to see the Structure 50 as one full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Two markets stand out above all else when looking at the first quarter of 2011: infrastructure as a service (IaaS) — the epitome of cloud computing — and big data. Amazon Web Services continues to lead the IaaS space in terms of customers and innovation, while Rackspace, buoyed by momentum around OpenStack, will be its primary competitor for mainstream customers. In the big data space, there are so many players and terms floating about it’s difficult for outsiders to get a handle on who’s who and what’s what, though such activity validates the technologies. Other developments this quarter included HP’s impending presence in the cloud computing and big data spaces and the realization that Intel won’t be left to die if low-power servers based on x86 processors catch on like the buzz late last year suggests they will. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Microsoft, Cloudera, SeaMicro and Facebook. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cisco is in trouble. It screwed up, and John Chambers acknowledged as much in his memo to employees Monday, which was later published on the company’s blog. The company’s biggest problem is that it has strayed from its core competency, a focus on networking. Read more »
Unlike the cap and congestion crowd, Verizon Communications keeps upgrading its network, planning for the cloud and streaming era coming up. It plans to upgrade backbone pipes in the U.S. along select routes to 100 Gigabit per second capacity before the second quarter of this year. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
IBM today said it would buy Blade Networks, a company that makes networking gear that can help vendors combine computing and networking in a box resembling Cisco’s server. Blade reported $79 million in revenue for 2009 and planned for revenue in excess of $100 million for 2010. Read more »
The rivalry between networking gear giants Cisco and Juniper has extended across routers, wireless products, and security services for years. But now it’s extended into a seemingly unusual area: the smart grid. Outside of mobile, it’s the next growth area for the networking and communications industry. Read more »
The rivalry between networking gear giants Cisco and Juniper has extended across routers, wireless products, and security services for years. But now it’s extended into a seemingly unusual area: the smart grid. That link-up is an interesting move that could help them team up against Cisco. Read more »
The season finale of Lost yesterday was seen by 13.5 million viewers in the U.S., plus millions more around the globe through an unprecedented simulcast aimed at preventing P2P piracy. Pundits may think that’s weak, since earlier episodes of had up to 20 million people viewers, […] Read more »
Apple Announces iAd Mobile Advertising Platform; Apple will sell and host the ads, giving 60 percent of ad revenue back to developers. Unlike most mobile ads, which kick users out of the application they’re currently using, iAd keeps users in the same app. (TechCrunch) Juniper Acquires […] Read more »
