Rattling the Tech Industry

I was at Oracle today listening to the company's top executives describing the new Oracle-Sun strategy. I can summarize my feedback in one word: WOW.

I'm sure that the folks at Oracle will continue with their success and integrate Sun well into Oracle. As a technology consumer we would benefit. As a technology vendor we will have to learn and improve.

Yesterday, InformationWeek listed the top 10 reasons for Oracle to buy Sun. In my opinion, the 8th item of the list, better integration of software, hardware and the OS will play a very important role in customer's acceptance of the integrated solution. Having been in the business of delivering solutions for more than 15 years, I have learned that providing value to the customer is one of the most important features. An integrated solution that does not require customers to build and integrate components by themselves while providing the operational and financial benefits is the right way to go.

Competitors (like IBM) have most or even all of the components as well but they lack the vision or desire to provide a fully-integrated solution to the customer.

I believe that today we witnessed an important event for the entire technology industry.

-- Sharon

10Gbps: It's here, it's now and going Xstream

It looks like 2010 will be remembered as the year of 10Gbps networking. Fueled by increasing demand for internal bandwidth within the data center and cloud computing service-rich content applications including video and music streaming (which are becoming embedded in almost every type of communication) as well as real time applications. Even though 2008 and most of 2009 were tough years for many vendors, the overall spending on networking and 10Gbps networks grew.

When I am reading articles that predict the future, I like to go back in time and search for former analysis in order to establish a baseline and compare previous predictions. Sometimes it can also provide perspective on how a market is evolving, which is important to understand the different growth vector.


Network World recently cited the Dell'Oro Group

Data center deployments of 10G Ethernet are helping to drive the market, according to Dell'Oro Group. The firm expects the global Ethernet switching market to grow modestly in 2010, to $16.3 billion from $15.6 billion in 2009. This is down considerably though from the $19.3 billion market in 2008, Dell'Oro notes

Several weeks earlier they provided some detailed numbers providing actual results for 10G vendors sales:

Total 10 Gigabit Ethernet revenues grew 10% to $737 million during the quarter, with most of the growth being driven by “purpose-built” 10 Gigabit Ethernet data center switches, Dell'Oro notes.

It is nice and very rewarding to see how in such a short amount of time those numbers beat any previous estimation (like this Cisco white paper):

These factors are expected to continue to fuel the momentum of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet market, which is expected to rapidly grow from US $385 million in 2004 to US$2.9 billion in 2009, according to the Dell’Oro Group.

At Net Optics we see the growing demand as well and support it with a variety of solutions to support customer needs for monitoring, security, audit and convergence. One of our popular solutions is the Link Aggregation switch




The iLink Agg Xstream is an intelligent link aggregator that combines traffic from as many as 20 network links or Span ports and sends it to four monitoring tools. Each of its 24 SFP+ ports accepts both 10G SFP+ and 1G-SFP transceivers, enabling 10G and 1G links, Span ports, and monitoring appliances to interconnect in any mix of speeds, including different fiber and copper media types. The iLink Agg Xstream automatically performs all data-rate and media-type conversions, enabling 10G traffic to be sent to 1G appliances, and 1G traffic to 10G tools. This capability protects your security appliance investment, because the iLink Agg Xstream enables you to apply your existing arsenal of 1G monitoring tools to your new 10G traffic links. You can aggregate the traffic from multiple 1G links and low-utilization 10G links to fill up the bandwidth of expensive 10G tools.

See a larger image version here

The iLink Agg Xstream device supports fully configurable port mapping, so it can provide many other configurations in addition to 20 network ports to four monitor ports. Preloaded aggregation configurations include:

A single 20x4 link Aggregator
Dual 10x2 aggregators
Quad 4x2 aggregators
Preloaded regeneration configurations include:

1-to-23
Dual 1-to-11
Quad 1-to-5
In addition, any port can function as a network port or a monitor port, so you can attach more than four monitoring tools or more than 20 network links, if required. Splitting the cables into separate transmit and receive fibers makes a total of 24 network inputs and 24 monitor outputs available for concurrent use. The network inputs can be connected to external Taps or switch Span ports. Direct in-line link connections are not supported.

Its key features are listed below:

• Increases monitoring efficiency by enabling tools to view the traffic on as many as 20 network links (from external Taps or Port Aggregators) or 20 Span ports simultaneously
• Improves monitoring flexibility with fully configurable port mappings (any number of links to any number of tools)
• Provides complete visibility at 10 Gbps without interfering with the data stream and without introducing a point of failure
• Supports media type and data rate conversion with SFP+ or SFP transceiver modules on both the network and monitor ports
• Enhances monitoring security because no IP address is needed
• Provides RMON statistics such as packet counts, bandwidth utilization, and threshold alarms to increase monitoring efficiency
• No interference with the data stream and no point of failure introduced
• Remote traffic statistics and configuration
• Security options control user access
• Redundant power ensures uptime
• Compatible with all Net Optics Taps
• IEEE 802.3 compliant
• Fully RoHS compliant

While no one can really predict the future, we definitely try to create it by adding more 10G solutions that will allow us to deliver solutions and address customer needs.

--Sharon

Network Capacity is Growing. More Ports Needed

There is no doubt that the amount of data traveling through the Internet, private clouds and any other network you can think of is growing very fast.

According to the new industry market study from Insight Research, overall telecommunications services revenues are expected to grow at a compounded rate of nearly 13.8% over the next few years, reaching $3.7 trillion by 2015.

Verizon plans more 100G and 40G deployments and NTT America is reportedly preparing to launch 100G services to accommodate continued growth of traffic demand on its network.

Besides the growth of bandwidth requirements, there are additional bandwidth consumers: servers, PCs, routers and switches that should be connected at the data center at faster rates without increasing the amount of "tin" that is deployed. In other words, for every single rack-mount unit deployed at the data center, more connections are required.

For this reason a next generation connector was developed. The SFP+ is about 30% smaller, require fewer components and consumes less power than the XFP. It will also cost less. For a top-of-the-rack switch, SFP+ will likely provide excellent cost, power and latency characteristics and still have enough reach to be very feasible inside the rack.If you are looking at 10G networks, you should consider using standard SPF+ connectors.



Image source: http://images.pennnet.com/articles/lw/cap/cap_303890.jpg

See also 10 Gigabit Ethernet – Alphabet Soup Never Tasted So Good! on Intel blogs Benjamin Hacker 3/2008

Technology Insights

Goldman Sachs released today an interesting document that predicts upcoming trends for the year and beyond. A January 10, 2010 document titled "Mapping 2010: Key Tech Trends to Watch" lists (like the name suggests) the key IT trends for 2010 based on customer surveys. This is the 50th issue of a spending report for 100 top managers with strategic decision making authority at multinational Fortune 1000 companies (of which, many are Net Optics customers). If you have access to Goldman Sachs reports I suggest that you read it as it includes many interesting insights that are relevant for organizations of all types and sizes.

Most of the comments are on spot and inline with our observation:

Over the next few years, we expect IT spending to be disproportionately directed toward several disruptive technologies (most notably virtualization) that will be the key enablers of next-generation data centers. 2010 should serve as an inflection point as plans made during the downturn, when CIOs investigated technologies that will increase flexibility and make costs more variable, come to fruition. This adds an important secular growth driver to the cyclical rebound we expect in tech spending given the under-investment across virtually every area of tech over the past year as the economy weakened.

In our opinion this will increase the need to provide data monitoring for capacity optimization, performance and activity monitoring in order to measure how those new solutions are being used. Net Optics tools are already used by the majority of top Fortune organizations as a basis for smart and intelligent monitoring.

-- Sharon

Net Optics Releases Director™ Web Manager

On January 8th, Net Optics released Director™ Graphical User Interface (GUI) Web Manager. This release offers a rich user interface for the Director™ Data Monitoring Switch to make configuration easier and allow point-and-click access.

A variety of new features are included in the release. The GUI’s JavaScript architecture supports robust interactive graphics. One can now specify ranges for IP addresses, ports and VLANs, and display the RMON statistics on a port-by-port basis. With the addition of port naming and aliases, users can easily identify the monitoring devices or network devices connected to a port. Also included is “wand-over” functionality that displays all the filters and network statistics that apply to a port. For commonly filtered network statistics and traffic of interest, you can specify filter policies with new and existing port mappings.

For more information please see the Software Management Suite page on the Net Optics Web site.