As expected, we’ve experienced a product launch craze just prior to Interop Las Vegas. I try to avoid marketing announcements, but the blogosphere exploded in hard-to-ignore posts ... and as always, it was great fun separating marketing fluff from reality. Here’s a grumpy take on the above-mentioned press releases.

HP

In their Interop press release, HP announced:

• Virtual Switch 5900v (which seems to be a competitor to Cisco’s Nexus 1000V and IBM’s DVS 5000V);
• Virtual Services Router (Comware-in-a-VM, seems to be a competitor to Cisco’s Cloud Services Router and Vyatta);
• HP FlexFabric 12900 switch – a 10/40/100 GE switch which seems like a competitor to Arista’s 7500E. Like all core switches HP announced in the last 2 years, this one will eventually support TRILL and SPB (you got the hint, right?);
• HP FlexFabric 11908 switch – a somewhat smaller 10/40 GE switch, yet again with OpenFlow (actually, it’s OpenFlow 1.3 ready – and my garage is Ferrari ready for a decade), TRILL and SPB support (yeah, I’ll believe the last two when I see them).

And now for a dose of reality – apart from 11908 (without TRILL, SPB, or MDC), which should be available by the end of June, HP claims everything else will ship in Q3/Q4 or even early next year. Who knows, maybe I’ll have something to include in November’s Data Center Fabric Update webinar ;)

Brocade

Brocade fares little better than HP. They announced a virtual ADX load balancer (joining F5, A10, Riverbed and almost every other load balancing vendor), DMVPN for Vyatta’s vRouter, 4x40GE modules for MLX routers, and OpenStack plugin for VCS fabric (read: glue between Quantum API and NETCONF on VCS fabric). For a longer overview, read the blog post by Pete Welcher.

I couldn’t find anything on the virtual ADX in Brocade’s documentation and there’s still no Vyatta release 6.6 documentation – when you pay proper respect to the regwall, you’re faced with release 6.5 documentation from October 2012.

It seems 4x40GE module is already in the MLX data sheet (or have they launched another 40GE module?) but I have a problem understanding what’s the real news there.

Summary: another announcement full of futures.

Arista

Arista launched a monster 100/40/10GE switch with hardware VXLAN gateway functionality and ridiculous pricing including $10K for a 100GE port (or 12x10GE ports) or under $600 for a 10GE port. Read Greg Ferro’s blog post for details. The best part of the announcement: the box is ACTUALLY SHIPPING. YAY!

Keeping in line with doing things differently than other vendors (like announcing shipping products), Arista introduced another cool EOS feature: Rapid Automated Indication of Link-Loss (RAIL) that helps kill TCP sessions to a lost IP host, drastically improving TCP convergence (which usually relies on TCP timeouts with default values in minutes). You probably know what I would do if I had to choose between TRILL, SPB, EVB and VEPA in a bright (and fuzzy) future or a set of features that solve real-life problems and challenges today ;)

Oh, and like everyone else in the industry, Arista announced OpenFlow 1.0 support, OpenFlow extensions (there’s nothing like embrace-and-extend strategy – but this time it actually makes sense), JSON API interface, and OpenStack Quantum plugin.

The only downside: it seems you have to wait for EOS release 4.12 to get most of the cool new features … too bad, I just lost some of my enthusiasm.

More information

For a real-life update of shipping (as in: being publicly documented in configuration guides available on vendors’ web sites) boxes and features, register for the Data Center Fabrics Update webinar.