Turns out x86 chips are getting pretty good at packet processing. Brocade and Telefónica say they got 80G out of the Brocade 5600 virtual router, the latest descendent of

Broadcom leads in Ethernet switches, and Intel leads in processors. Now Cavium can better match up against both of them, with the pending acquisition of startup Xpliant.

The date is here: July 31. Cisco's ACI is ready to start shipping, in a pricing model based on perpetual licenses and with prefab bundles intended to nudge existing

Everyone seems to be producing an ARM 64-bit chip these days, and Cavium, which announced its ARM plans in 2012, is no exception. But Cavium claims its advantage is

Pluribus offers its own hardware, but it's a software company at heart. A deal with Supermicro could help the startup show what its combination of switching and CPU control

With a $5M funding round, Edgewater Networks will test the idea of running virtualized security appliances on its Edgemarc session border controllers. The hope is to give carriers another

With its new Layerscape chips, Freescale is trying to make a system-on-chip friendly enough for software people. The goal was to abstract the network, much in the way that

This week, Cisco put itself forth as a champion of policy-based networking, but it turns out VMware Chief Networking Architect Martin Casado has been looking in that direction too.

Here's a shock: Interop Las Vegas is full of SDN chatter. Juniper Contrail gets a security partner; HP makes progress on its app store; Broadcom continues its control-plane push;

A busy week in SDN and NFV, thanks to the Open Networking Summit. In addition to Infonetics' analysis of a slow Q4 for routers and switches, we have items

OK, they still look like switches, but Corsa's boxes are purely OpenFlow beasts, their only job being to execute OpenFlow commands in a pure SDN environment.

A new IETF standard called Geneve proposes a way to unify the tunneling methods that have emerged for network virtualization. It might settle any VXLAN-vs.-NVGRE arguments, but it also

Now we know what Pluribus does: It's fused a server and switch together, creating a new top-of-rack element that gives applications access to network knowledge. And it's off to

White-box switches are mostly associated with big data-center deployments, but they can be useful in carrier environments, too. It's partly a matter of carriers adopting the right attitude about

Chip startups are out of favor in funding circles, and yet, two of them have emerged to challenge Broadcom. Along with Intel and Mellanox eyeing the market, it's a

Kicking off a short series of articles about white-box switching, we talk with CEOs JR Rivers and James Liao about how Cumulus and Pica8 see this market. It's not

Guess who's using Trident II chips from Broadcom? OK, practically everybody, but Extreme is too, in an announcement apparently timed to avoid the Insieme hype. Differentiating is tough when

Cisco launches Insieme at long last on Nov. 6. What's in the box? Cisco has dropped plenty of hints about the approach, which is in opposition to VMware's, and

The last of the MIPS holdouts in the embedded-processor space, Broadcom has moved its latest multicore processor design to ARM, giving that company a promising foothold in network functions

Maybe so. The Interop keynotes didn't enlighten much, if you're already on the SDN bandwagon, but they reinforced the idea that what we're calling 'SDN' will be normal networking

The Vyatta router makes the jump to 10 Gb/s, partly the result of Intel's refueled ambitions in the packet processing space. Software appliances will need those speeds to keep

Still pushing the idea of ASICs over merchant chips, Cisco is reportedly ready to announce a processor that enables 400G ports

Nicira gets its true coming-out party, as the NSX platform takes center stage at VMworld 2013 with a host of hardware providers eager to proclaim support. The key is

SDxCentral’s Weekly Roundup – July 26, 2013