Alcatel-Lucent brings 40G to the core

Aerial view of Bell Labs Holmdel Complex. The Bell Labs building in Holmdel is an architectural heirloom, designed by renowned architect Eero Saarinen, with a proud and distinguished history. For 44 years it was the home of an advanced research lab owned successively by Bell Telephone, AT&T, Lucent, and Alcatel.
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Jim Duffy – Alcatel-Lucent this week at Interop will flesh out its data center fabric vision with 40G Ethernetand higher-density 10G Ethernet capabilities on its core switches, as well as enhanced software for its top-of-rack and core switches.

The extensions to Alcatel-Lucent‘s Application Fluent Networking (AFN) strategy are intended to offer users a low latency, multipath network with which to establish multi-site private clouds and connect to public clouds offered by service providers. In this endeavor, Alcatel-Lucent’s AFN will go up against fabrics like Cisco‘s FabricPath and CloudVerse, Juniper’s QFabric, Brocade’s Brocade One and Cloudplex, and HP’s FlexNetwork. more> http://tinyurl.com/ch7md5q

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Avaya beefs up switch architecture to compete with Cisco, HP, others

By Jim Duffy – The new Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 4000 series switches are designed to help enterprises optimize networks for collaboration, and simplify the convergence of voice, video and data. One of the key new features of the line is a boost in stacking bandwidth from 320G to 384Gbps.

The switches are compatible with Avaya‘s Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA), a blueprint unveiled a year ago to allow users to optimize the network for business applications and services through virtualization.  VENA is competing with other network virtualization and fabric architectures from Cisco, Brocade, HP, Dell, IBM, Extreme, Enterasys, Alcatel-Lucent, and others. more> http://twurl.nl/kebyrr

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Fabric wars: Cisco vs. Brocade vs. Juniper

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By Jim Duffy – The past three years have been very noisy on the data center fabric and architecture front. Every quarter seems to bring about a new convergence blueprint from another vendor – and a variety from one or two.

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is being pushed hard by Cisco. It consolidates server adapter ports by tunneling FCoE instead of requiring a separate Fibre Channel network.

Brocade has some FCoE products but is not as bullish as Cisco on the technology. That’s because Brocade has the lion’s share of the Fibre Channel SAN market – it would lose Fibre Channel revenue to Cisco.

Juniper‘s QFabric seeks to flatten and simplify data center networks to accommodate growth of devices and applications, virtualized servers and storage, and cloud-enabled on-demand access to virtualized pools of IT resources. more> http://is.gd/MkPxbw

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