Brocade Acquires Cisco Competitor Vyatta
Brocade Acquires Cisco Competitor Vyatta by UCStrategies Staff
Network solutions company Brocade, is set to purchase Cisco challenger Vyatta in November 2012. The merger will result in the coupling of Vyatta’s cloud computing platforms, network virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN) with Brocade’s Ethernet fabric architecture.
A company spokesperson said that it is “highly relevant for multiple applications in network virtualization, software-defined networking and private/public cloud computing platforms.”
Although the terms of the deal have not been announced, Brocade has admitted that the acquisition was an all-cash agreement.
“This acquisition complements our R&D investments in Ethernet fabrics and SDN, as well as our broad industry and solutions-level partnerships that enable Brocade to pursue new market opportunities in data center virtualization, public cloud, enterprise virtual private cloud, and managed services,” said Brocade CEO Mike Klayko.
SDNs are currently a popular topic throughout the tech industry. Although they have been in play for a while, they garnered sudden interest when VMware acquired Nicira and some time later, Oracle bought Xsigo. Not to be outdone, Cisco has also pointed out that it is also a contender in the software-defined networking sector.
The purpose of SDNs is to manage networks in such a way as to abstract the hardware, allowing it to be configured from one location. This means that networking equipment becomes virtualized in the same way that servers were.
The proposed advantages of SDNs is that they can cut administrative costs by reducing the number of staff a company needs as well as creating more flexible networks. However, all may not be quite as good as it seems. According to Gartner there is currently more than $40 billion of non-SDN compatible equipment in deployment.
“We believe software networking to be a critical component in the next phase of network virtualization as enterprises are becoming increasingly virtualized and actively moving workloads to the cloud,” said Ken Cheng, vice president of the Routing, Application Delivery and Software Networking Group at Brocade.
Brocade intends to take advantage of Vyatta’s network operating systems, particularly security, VPN service and routing. Brocade intends to integrate this technology with its virtualized data center applications.
Gartner has made the following recommendations:
- SDN is in the early stages of development, do your research and watch out for the hype.
- Take the time to analyze the pros and cons of introducing SDN to your business.
- Don’t let SDN be the cause of disruption in your organization. Focus on integration of server, network and storage teams.
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