Brian Wolfe, a partner at Laurus Technologies and head of our Networking practice, writes that the Networking landscape has fundamentally changed – it’s no longer “Cisco and the Seven dwarfs.” Here’s what he had to say:
There is a lot to like about this new HP Networking product portfolio for Cisco shops. Many organizations are taking a closer look at HP Networking based on the guidance that Gartner has provided recently that HP should be considered for any new networking project. Whether you incorporate some of HP’s networking products into your network to reduce your capital and operating expenditures or gain access to some of the innovation with IRF and Tipping Point, I suspect you won’t feel like you are dealing with a dwarf.
A few months ago HP announced that it had completed the acquisition of 3Com. This event transformed the networking industry which had previously consisted of only one major player that could address all of the networking needs for large organizations.
The other players in the networking arena had product portfolios that could only address a subset of the needs of most organizations. Due to this lack of competition in the networking market we have not seen the level of innovation in the past 10 years that had existed in the previous 10 years before that.
While Cisco has done an admirable job acquiring technology to build its portfolio from dozens of small companies, this has resulted in complex customer deployments that are difficult to manage. Cisco has far too many disparate management tools that are fragmented having come through acquisitions. As a result of the complexity it takes to manage a Cisco environment many organizations don’t even bother using Cisco’s tools; instead they use 3rd party tools such as SolarWinds Orion or open source tools such as Nagios, OpenNMS, Cacti and others.
What most people haven’t yet realized about HP’s acquisition of 3Com is that the new HP Networking product portfolio has the ability to out-perform Cisco’s high-end products like the Nexus 7000, often by a factor of two and at a much lower cost of acquisition. Once you start looking at the ongoing hardware/software support costs, which in some cases with HP may be $0, there is an even larger savings.
HP Networking Is not just about saving money, there is some very interesting innovation within HP’s enterprise switching products with switch virtualization software called Intelligent Resiliency Framework (IRF) that allows multiple HP switches to operate as a single large layer2/layer 3 device running as a single device from a routing protocol standpoint that can perform link/path failover measured in microseconds.
IRF is very exciting technology, but it’s not exactly new, 3com has had it for years. Imagine if you were able to virtualize all of your core and distribution switches into a single virtual switch that you could manage as a single switch with hundreds (or even thousands) of ports and just one instance of your routing protocols and with failover time measured in microseconds. That’s what you can do with the new HP networking.
And as far as management tools, 3Com’s IMC tool is able to manage both the wired and wireless products in the HP Networking portfolio as well as a few thousand non-HP products. IMC is a real jewel that allows you to manage a broad range of networking products from a provisioning and security standpoint from a single pane of glass.
Tipping Point, the leading intrusion Prevention System (IPS) came along with the 3Com acquisition. Cisco doesn’t have anything that can compete with Tipping Point in terms of the breadth of protection it can provide as an in-line IPS, especially for Zero day attacks, or from a performance perspective.
