Stories by Jim Duffy

HP this week refreshed its switch line and fortified its SDN portfolio with three new systems and a router, along with management and provisioning software extensions.

Charles W. Berger is the beleaguered company's new president and CEO.

Jonathan Davidson took over Juniper campus and data center switching when the two previously separate business units were combined following the departure of founding engineer R.K. Anand. Davidson has a service provider routing background at Juniper and Cisco, which is no coincidence -- after five years in switching, Juniper has been unable to mirror the success it had in its first five years in service provider routing. But it did start from zero and surpassed at least six other incumbent vendors to attain the No. 3 position in the market. The company has more than 20,000 switching customers cultivated through organic development, Davidson notes. And as Juniper moves forward amid a forklift upgrade facing its EX core switch base and after an initial misfire on the QFabric data center switch, it's focusing on customer demands for simplification, agility and automation. Davidson discussed some recent and future developments in Juniper enterprise switching.

IBM is asking that people judge the OpenDaylight SDN project by its accomplishments, not by its roster.

The third annual Open Networking Summit, an SDN conference organized by the Open Networking Foundation, convened this week just after ONF members Cisco and IBM unveiled a separate effort to define an open source SDN framework.

Cisco last week extended its datacentre product line to support Microsoft's Windows Server 2012 hypervisor and VM management features to more tightly align their respective datacentre and Cloud architectures for joint customers.

SDNs aren't just for data center networks, despite the best-use-case-scenario arguments for network virtualization and flow management pervading the industry.

Cisco Senior Vice President John McCool, CTO of the enterprise segment and instrumental in data center fabric initiatives, has left the company after 17 years.

If you're skeptical about the intentions of the OpenDaylight SDN consortium, you're not alone.

Software-defined network, software-defined datacentre ... and now software-defined fabric.

Arista Networks this week unveiled software-defined networking (SDN) extensions to its data center switch operating system that tie the company's products into cloud orchestration and flow management systems.

Cisco this week reduced its workforce by about 500 people as the company realigns to face the advent of software-defined networking, cloud computing and its impact on routing and switching.

In an effort to accelerate the adoption of OpenFlow for software-defined networking, Big Switch Networks this week unveiled an open source-based "thin" virtual switch for servers and commodity switches.

Any hopes Juniper EX8200 customers had that the core switch would grow to support next-generation 40/100G Ethernet, mobility, media-rich traffic, virtualization or cloud have been dashed.

Juniper Networks is readying a new programmable core switch to address software-defined networking in campuses and data centers.