Intel is showcasing its networking silicon, but it’s also offering two reference designs — one for new switches and one for new servers that would use Intel’s new chips. It’s also showing of a software layer called the Intel Data Plane Development Kit for OpenVSwitch that will accelerate packet processing on Intel’s CPUs instead of on dedicated network processors. One of the reference designs is aimed at the data center and the top of rack switches made by Cisco, Juniper, Arista and Force10 (owned by Dell), and the other is more of a punch for Cisco and Juniper in that it’s aimed at service providers. In fact, at the event Intel said Verizon was testing a prototype version of its reference design.

With these offerings, Intel is putting Broadcom, a popular maker of merchant silicon, on notice that it’s going directly after its business. That’s not surprising. The only question is how low Intel will go in pricing to put the hurt on Broadcom. But it’s also providing designs and capabilities that could obviate the need for special-purpose silicon that Cisco and Juniper currently rely on in their high-end boxes. Intel has gone after special purpose hardware before when it took on Sun and IBM in the server world with its x86 chips for personal computers.

Intel’s moves into the networking world are a symptom of the broader shift in computing. On the consumer side, mobility is changing the devices we use. In the enterprise, considerations of power consumption can now trump performance. In fact, super chips like the ones Intel traditionally sells can cause their own challenges in a virtualized world because using all of that capacity requires data center operators to virtualize the hardware and complicate their lives.

On the enterprise side the architecture to support our computing needs is changing as well as the workloads. The business considerations are changing too. This is a trend that’s shifting the ground underfoot all of the large IT vendors. So to see Intel going after its fellow chipmakers is perhaps unsurprising, but to see it going after Cisco’s and Juniper’s markets is like watching a rat resort to cannibalism during a time of starvation.

IT companies aren’t starving yet, but they are under stress, as Intel’s lackluster earnings indicate. The very real disruptions caused by a new generation of computing and web infrastructure are going to eat away at the margins and business models supporting today’s giants. Seen in this context, Intel’s moves aren’t surprising, but they are a symptom of the overall disruption in the IT world.

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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• The promise of software-defined networking

Last night I attended the opening cocktail reception for a radically different ONS and had the chance to reflect on how rapidly the once-staid field of networking is changing. There were about 1,500 people registered, which was the limit of the venue. The event had grown to the Santa Clara Convention Center and attendees were a fairly even mix of suits and engineers.

The biggest change was the exhibitor section. Where in 2011 the exhibitor hall was a narrow corridor at the Stanford conference center where a little more than a dozen students, companies and non profits had set up “booths” to showcase their ideas for Open Flow, there was now a few rows of booths — most of which were quite professional.

In October 2011, I attended the show for one day and moderated a panel where I recall asking Dave Ward, who was then CTO and Chief Architect of the Platform Systems Division at Juniper, what he would do if Stuart Elby, the VP of digital architecture at Verizon, a Juniper customer, got so excited about the promise of OpenFlow and SDN that it stopped buying expensive Juniper gear.

Ward danced a bit but essentially said that Juniper had the features and expertise to pull networking gear together that Verizon would pay for. The subtext (and knowing Ward, it may have been directly stated) was that he wasn’t an idiot and he was well aware that the networking industry was shifting. But his company would figure it out.

Six months later, the same conference had grown to 700 people and had Google showing off its own networking coup — it had built a software defined network using OpenFlow that connected its data centers. And Ward was still on a panel I moderated, only now he was at Cisco: preaching the same ideas but now at a company with the resources to carry it through.

Fast forward to the opening of the summit this year on Tuesday, and I’m eager to see what awaits. All I can tell is that so far the industry has moved from the excitement of translating a new technology into a commercial endeavor — one that scored a $1.26 billion transaction when VMware purchased Nicira — to one where use cases are more common and vendor fighting has started capturing a bit of the event conversation.

Indeed, mixed among the many case studies I’ve heard so far is speculation about the vendor-led Open Daylight Foundation that includes IBM, Cisco and VMware as strange bedfellows trying to build an open source controller for the software defined data center.

Just eighteen months removed from its inaugural event, software-defined networking has clearly learned to walk — if not run.

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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

In his annual letter to shareholders (PDF) on Friday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, reiterated his company’s rage to update features and functions (and then cut prices) on Amazon Web Services.

According to Bezos, AWS which he characterized as a “clear example of internally driven motivation” put out 159 new features and services in 2012 and cut prices 27 times since launching 7 years ago. (Frankly, 27 sounds like an undercount to me, but he’s the boss.)

He also touted Amazon’s commitment to enterprise customers. Amazon has

“… added enterprise service support enhancements, and created innovative tools to help customers be more efficient. AWS Trusted Advisor monitors customer configurations, compares them to known best practices, and then notifies customers where opportunities exist to improve performance, enhance security, or save money. Yes, we are actively telling customers they’re paying us more than they need to. In the last 90 days, customers have saved millions of dollars through Trusted Advisor, and the service is only getting started. All of this progress comes in the context of AWS being the widely recognized leader in its area – a situation where you might worry that external motivation could fail. On the other hand, internal motivation – the drive to get the customer to say “Wow” – keeps the pace of innovation fast.”

The lastest tidbit for enterprise users was this week’s addition of support for Microsoft Hyper-V support in Amazon’s Storage Gateway. For more on Bezos’ letter, here’s  PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen’s take.

Bezos’ letter comes at a time when more observers question whether AWS really is the low-cost option when it comes to non-variable (inelastic) production workloads — as opposed to development and test jobs — but that’s a quibble. Until one or more of the OpenStack crowd or, more likely, Google Compute Engine, hits its stride, AWS remains the public cloud to beat.

OpenStack: the ABM (Anyone But Amazon) alliance?

The OpenStack crowd is getting larger. This week — barring last minute delays at Monday’s board meeting — Juniper Networks and Ericsson — should be aboard the OpenStack Foundation as Gold members, as GigaOM reported Friday. Both companies were already sponsoring companies but board membership brings a bigger financial contribution and presumably more influence. With them in the fold and especially after VMware joined last summer, it’s become easier to list which vendors are not in the OpenStack ecosystem than those who are. And that list would be Amazon, Google, Joyent, Microsoft and Oracle.

OpenStack, when it was born more than 3 years ago was an attempt by Rackspace and NASA to build an open-source alternative to Amazon in the public cloud and to prevent VMware from leveraging its virtualization lock in enterprise data centers into the cloud. The effort, as measured by by third-party vendor support has exploded since then, especially after Rackspace turned over the reins to the OpenStack Foundation two years ago. Since then the floodgates opened with HP, IBM, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, joining younger companies — like Cloudscaling, Nebula, Piston Cloud (see disclosure) on the effort. Let’s see, that would be Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and Joyent. Or as Joyent CTO Jason Hoffman quipped — giving his company top billing OpenStack would be the “Anybody but JAMOG” alliance.

Piston Cloud updates

Perhaps seeking to beat the rush that’s bound to come next week at the OpenStack Summit, Piston Cloud (see disclosure) brought out Release 2.0 of its OpenStack cloud, or as InformationWeek called it “OpenStack on a stick.”

According to Informationweek:

“The customer sets a few configuration parameters on the cloud key memory stick, then inserts it into the USB port of a top-of-rack’s Ethernet switch. The system loads into the Linux server space of the switch, discovers the servers in the rack, and configures them into a system with virtual machine provisioning, pooled storage and networking and cloud management.”

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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We see it clearly in companies such as Google or Facebook, where the cost of computing has a direct impact on the cost of goods sold. But it’s also becoming the case in banks, retail shops and other sectors of the economy where mobile,  digital or cloud strategies all are facets of the same issue: an attempt to wed the business to technology and an understanding that technology is the business.

We get it. That’s why this year’s Structure conference, on June 19 and 20 in San Francisco, will have speakers like Kevin Scott of LinkedIn. He’s going to share what he learned throughout the process of re-architecting the social networking site to brings its costs in line with its growing scale. Scott is part of a new generation of IT professionals who aren’t just trying to solve business problems with technology but are building architectures that are integral parts of the business.

Jeff Dean at Google is doing something similar — although he’s thinking at a much larger scale. The computer scientist who co-wrote the search giant’s MapReduce paper is responsible for rethinking Google’s architecture for the new era of the web, where the hardware and software must support real-time distributed systems, capable of interacting naturally with people. It’s a tall order, but he’ll talk about where IT is going and how to build systems that can handle that future.

Finally, we have a familiar face in a new role. Bob Muglia, who is the executive vice president of Juniper’s Software Solutions, will talk about how he plans to shift one of the innovators of the switching era as its business is disrupted by both the new OpenFlow protocol and the development of software-defined networking. Already, Muglia has forced the $9.65 billion company to change its business model and how it sells some of its hardware. He’ll discuss software-defined networks and what it means to be able to program the hardware infrastructure on demand and without having to physically touch the hardware.

The entire IT industry is poised between the promise of awesome opportunities as computing becomes cheaper and our ability to capture data expands, and the fear of disruption as open source hardware and new layers of abstraction threaten to tear down the barriers to entry. It’s a crazy time in IT and Structure speakers will help you capitalize on it, either from the business side or with deep dives into the future of technology. Register today so you can join us in San Francisco on June 19 and 20.

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Affected sites include Wikileaks, 4chan and others according to this Techcrunch report.

One reason CloudFlare opts for Juniper is the latter’s support for the Flowspec protocol which enables customers to propagate router rules across a large number of routers fast, according to the company post. This comes in handy because CloudFlare is always updating rules to combat ever-changing attacks and to re-route traffic as needed to optimize performance.

This morning CloudFlare detected a DDoS attack on one of its customers and its attack profiler ascertained the offending packets were  between 99,971 and 99,985 bytes.

That attack profile was sent out to Flowspec to stop the spread of attacks. From the post mortem:

“Flowspec accepted the rule and relayed it to our edge network. What should have happened is that no packet should have matched that rule because no packet was actually that large. What happened instead is that the routers encountered the rule and then proceeded to consume all their RAM until they crashed.”

Service was restored after about an hour, although CloudFlare said it continues to examine the issue and has contacted Juniper to see if there is a known bug involved or the problem is unique to CloudFlare’s implementation.

Update: On Monday, Juniper said via email that it is looking into the reported network outage.  ”While we have not completed our investigation, we believe this incident was triggered by a product issue that Juniper identified last October, when a patch was also made available. Our customer support team is actively supporting Cloudflare in its efforts to resolve the issue and we are not aware of any other customers experiencing similar issues.”

Cedexis’ Radar view of CloudFlare outage.

Given that the number of DDoS attacks is on the rise, web sites had better gird themselves and hope their security vendors are taking proactive steps to keep ahead of the problem.

This story was updated at 12:25 p.m. PDT with Juniper’s comment.

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Software-defined networking doesn’t require OpenFlow. And it will still make a network programmable and responsive in ways that both scaled-out web-services providers and enterprise customers dealing with virtualization will appreciate. But it won’t necessarily affect the underlying networking hardware in the same way OpenFlow can. However, OpenFlow — the protocol that aims to separate the intelligence required to route a packet from the act of moving a packet– can commoditize the switches and routers. And it will have a big impact on the networking vendors such as Cisco, Arista and Juniper.

SDN is good for many things, but not everything.

Nick McKeown, one of the fathers of OpenFlow onstage at Structure.

But it’s early: the promise of real, commodity-based networking gear will not dissipate. Stu Bailey, the CTO of Infoblox told me last week as his company was launching new software-based networking products that the emphasis on specialized chips and networking hardware is doomed. Both cloud and the enterprise networks are becoming increasingly complicated; not just because of virtualization and scale, but also because of the increasing number of devices at the edge. Smartphones are pressuring networks, but adding sensors and other connected devices as integral business equipment, will require some serious thinking about networking hardware and cost.

“How quickly will a large healthcare org realize that the network is not the collection of routers and switches, but is instead these things connected to the network?” asked Bailey. “And how they interact fundamentally and how they are secured is responsible for the business. With that awareness they need SDN economics and OpenFlow will hasten that.” Hence InfoBlox’s decision to focus on software — software that is OpenFlow compatible.

This revolution won’t come immediately, but it will come.

Others, such as Jim Theodoras, director of technical marketing at ADVA, an optical provider to data centers, have expressed similar thoughts. Theodora has also expressed frustration that so far the message of router and hardware commoditization has been ignored. But for the most part, the existing products on the market and their associated marketing and product managers have been good at loudly shouting down the camp of people who see OpenFlow as a legitimate threat to the hardware makers. And it’s not just marketing. There are many obstacles to deploying an OpenFlow-based networking infrastructure.

(L to R) Lane Patterson, CTO, Equinix; Kenneth Duda, Founder, CTO and SVP, Software Engineering, Arista Networks
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

One obstacle, other than just getting the gear to work, is that the current chips sold by merchant silicon providers aren’t ready to support the most recent and faster versions of OpenFlow. NoviFlow, a startup in Montreal, that just announced an OpenFlow compatible switch that processes information at 100 gigabits per second per second — a significant amount of capacity when we’re talking about the data center market — went with specialty networking processors. It couldn’t build such a high capacity OpenFlow switch with existing chips, so it used network processors from EZChip. It’s still using a specialty chip to make its boxes, much like Cisco and Juniper do.

OpenFlow creates a common networking platform, not lock-in

NoviFlow’s 100 Gbps switch.

Marc LeClerc, NoviFlow’s VP of strategy and marketing is anticipating that day, explaining that NoviFlow has a high-end switch, but that it expects customers to also purchase lower-end gear that they will expect will work with the NoviFlow products. And when that day comes, the question is what kind of shakeout we’ll see in the networking world.

“When the world went over from mainframes to client-server it was a huge shift and plenty of companies that used to play in that market like Wang and DEC are no longer around anymore,” Bailey said.

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• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
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It has also embraced the network virtualization and programmability that other proponents of SDNs have put forth — which will give its customers some of the ease they crave when it comes to dealing with virtualized and scaled out servers — but it did so in a way that embraces modularity rather than any sort of customer-controlled remapping of the network. This is probably the smartest thing Juniper could do, especially given that plenty of customers don’t want to take the Google-like step of building of their own infrastructure.

Network’s big shift

The networking world is undergoing a giant shift, almost as significant a shift as the introduction of switches two decades ago. The current shift is caused by the need for flatter networking architectures as data centers scale out, less physical complexity as servers become virtualized, and a faster way to handle the challenges of more servers talking to each other between racks as opposed to sending their information out of the data center.

One of the proposed solutions for these problems is creating a layer of abstraction between the brains of the network and the gear responsible for routing packets. Once this occurs, it’s possible to put commodity gear inside the data center and smart software on x86 machines that will then orchestrate the network. Open Flow, a protocol designed at Stanford was one way to enable this abstraction at the lowest levels of the network by separating the movement of packets from the intelligence needed to control the routes those packets took. But there are other ways to get this separation and abstract the network — and those ways also mean that there will still be room for specialized networking equipment. But in most of the new software-defined networks the end goal is to give data center operators more programmability, the ability to buy cheaper gear and the ability to abstract the physical network from the applications.

Juniper’s big shift

In a call Tuesday, Bob Muglia, EVP of software solutions at Juniper, laid out how Juniper is adapting to the new networking paradigm with a change in how it prices its products, as well as a complete SDN strategy. Muglia, who helped Microsoft move its applications to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud, has experience in adjusting to the dynamics of delivering software for the cloud. And that’s what Juniper will do.

Software is eating the networking world. Thus, Juniper will shift from selling expensive boxes with software baked in, to selling the gear and in a separate transaction, software for those boxes based on a licensing model familiar to enterprise software. Customers will buy a license and then pay a maintenance fee. They will also be able to buy a subscription instead. Muglia didn’t give details about how this change in pricing would change both the makeup of the company’s sales force and its margins, but the financial world will be watching both.

The product strategy supporting it all

Juniper has broken down the network into four layers: forwarding, control, services and management. At the lowest level, forwarding, it plans to work with protocols including Open Flow, but it will not include it in its hardware, nor will it rely on that. Instead, it will rely on tried-and-true protocols such as BGP, which makes sense because this helps stop the utter commoditization of the router. It also fits with Juniper’s recent acquisition of Contrail systems.

The control layer is where the brains and communications between the device on the network will occur, while the services layer will offer a way to route certain features such as firewalls, network traffic analysis and security off the network for additional processing. The management layer is where the programmability happens. The Junos Space software, out today, is the delivery mechanism for customers to begin separating their networks into these layers.

This is Juniper’s view of the network. Other than the forwarding layer, it thinks that everything else should be centralized. The plan is to bring partners in at the services level, although Muglia was not certain how that would work and what APIs might end up being shared, saying that they would have to wait and see what users demanded. At the management layer, the plan now is to allow that software to work with VMware and OpenStack-based cloud management stacks.

In the first quarter of this year, Juniper will announce the JunosV App Engine that will allow customers to start building boxes that can handle some of the offloading of services off the network hardware and onto commodity boxes. Some time in 2014, Juniper will complete its vision with a product that will allow for the pulling together of modular network services that customers can then “chain” together using newer versions of the App Engine software as well as Junipers MX and SRX boxes.

The company has posted a detailed blog post about its plans and the new licensing model. As the networking world changes, it seems that Juniper has done what it can to adapt without ensuring its extinction. Now all eyes will be on Cisco to see if it takes such a drastic step as well.

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That’s a wonderful return for Contrail’s investors, which this summer put $10 million in the startup (Juniper was a strategic investor in that round). It’s also a smart move for Juniper coming just a few weeks after Cisco announced its own SDN-related purchase, a $141 million purchase of Cariden, although that was more about network virtualization for service provider customers and delivering carrier apps on top of its platform.

By comparison, Contrail is more of an enterprise software-defined networking play. The company has a few test customers and aims to make network virtualization as well as network-aware applications easier for enterprises to stomach. The company is pitching a distributed networking operating system as well as an orchestration layer that supports a variety of common protocols like XMPP and BGP. This means it will run on top of already deployed Cisco and Juniper gear.

Juniper has worked to build out software that addresses the changing traffic patterns in the data center.  With this deal it gets a team —  from Aruba and Google — that is aware of challenges faced by enterprise customers. These companies want the advantages of SDN without hiring a team of specialized network engineers and replacing all their gear. As players jockeying for space in the software defined networking sector solidify their offerings (Contrail’s was supposed to come out in 2013) it’s clear that big vendors such as Cisco, VMware and Juniper — which want to make sure the market goes their way — are getting aggressive when it comes to claiming their turf.

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The promise of software-defined networking

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