Q&A: Networking Landscape, Q4 2010

Landing on the moon or the Jonas Brothers' debut doesn't hold a candle to the awesome state of today's networking landscape. Customers couldn't be in a better position to have true networking choices. Hewlett-Packard acquired 3Com, Brocade spiced up Foundry with its Brocade One initiative, and Juniper entered the high-end switch market with a bang. Meanwhile, Cisco Systems has left the gate with its Nexus and UCS solutions. Regardless of the platform, we believe Ethernet is the future of all data center networking, especially as solutions emerge that bridge the gap from high-performance options like InfiniBand and Fibre Channel (FC) — which will be around for a long time. So what's next? Infrastructure managers should: 1) leave behind the traditional three-tiered data center and move toward the promised land of a two-tiered LAN architecture; 2) make the change to a converged Ethernet slowly with FCoE and avoid major overhauls until SANs are phased out in 10 years; and 3) save money on data center networking by evaluating all vendors and being open to a multivendor network.