SC13 features some optical technology and a bit of SDN; Riverbed grooms a new image; Internet2's next big project is a hybrid cloud for universities; Ixia announces some switches

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

White boxes might not be as cheap as you think. Data centers are clearly intrigued by the idea of off-the-shelf hardware, but the transition comes with its costs. Even

When is open-source not 'open-source' enough? Centec says it's taking open-source switching a step further with Lantern, a free distribution that includes the chipmaker's SDK. It's a bet on

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

Its all about ingestion, which means big data might not be the topic to discuss over lunch. VSS' products gather data for performance-monitoring engines to process, and the company

Who secures all that east-west traffic in the data center? Pretty much nobody, which means there's a product category about to happen. Palo Alto Networks is taking a shot

In the headlines this week: Cisco's Q2 guidance causes a freakout; Nuage Networks names customers; EMC tries out this all-flash-storage thing; Amazon talks about its own storage ideas; and

For a few years now, we've all been waiting for that inevitable Arista Networks IPO. It looks like it's on, as a news report Tuesday says Andy Bechtolsheim and

A switch company called Interface Masters — and no, it's not a startup — has submitted an open-source switch design to the Open Compute Project. Chip vendors Broadcom, Intel,

Last week's Insieme launch didn't live up to all the rumors, and it might have helped feed a few new ones. From software-defined storage to pricing, here are the

As Cisco's Insieme launch showed, the network should be application-aware, and applications should be network-aware. The question is where to put the demarcation lines. Done right, it can produce

Here you'll find links to our Cisco/Insieme coverage (so far), which dominated the week. The OpenStack Summit took place on the other side of the world, creating a news

Comepetitors made the usual rumblings about Cisco's hardware, but their arguments on the policy and management side are more important and set up a challenge as Cisco brings its

The controllerless top-of-rack F64 is ready for general availability, so Pluribus has decided it's ready for a new CEO. Fourteen-year Cisco veteran Kumar Srikantan is tasked with building Netvisor's

Maybe overlays aren't so bad after all. Insieme and parent company Cisco have been dissing them since June as a way to counter VMware and others. But guess what:

Happy Insieme Day. Cisco is now revealing what the SDN startup has been up to. Insieme is offering the new Nexus 9000 switches, and a fabric called APIC that's

Big Switch co-founder Guido Appenzeller is becoming CTO as the company brings in Douglas Murray, who's been running the Asia/Pacific business at Juniper. He's the one tasked with leading

Layer 2/3 fabrics get all the attiention, so F5 wants to give the upper layers some love, creating a Layer 4-7 fabric that turns ADCs into a flexible, pooled

Let's just say we're glad it's not called 'speaf.' The spline is a single-tier architecture that Arista is targeting at more normal-sized enterprises, rather than the high-end data center.

We've picked a handful of industry names (some more seriously than others) to fill Kevin Johnson's shoes. The key is that Juniper has to choose a leader — and

Noteworthy bits from the week: The TM Forum gets interested in the management side of NFV; Ixia strikes a deal for Net Optics; Brocade has an idea for OpenStack;

The battle against overlay networks is on. As Cisco prepares its Insieme launch, Big Switch is starting beta tests for its 'P+V' strategy for unifying physical and virtual networks.

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