I’ve been watching the LAN market a long time – as a journalist and analyst for nine years and as a vendor for another eight since then – and this has been one of the more interesting weeks in LAN infrastructure in years.
After not changing much since the advent of switches in the early 90s and routing switches in the mid-90s, the LAN market saw some pretty interesting events this week. Cisco’s targeting of the data center switch market with its Nexus announcement on Monday is one example of the move toward greater intelligence and application awareness in the network. Add in Cisco’s philosophy in TrustSec of the need for role-based networking and the intelligence they’re talking about in the PISA blade for the 6500, and that’s a lot of places in the LAN getting a lot smarter about users and applications.
Then you have Juniper, in what has to be one of the industry’s worst-kept secrets in years, coming out yesterday with its entrance into the LAN switch market. While the initial switches appear to offer just the basic L2/L3 switching capabilities, the company has a history of distinguishing itself in application smarts and other value-add capabilities, and one would hope Juniper will eventually apply this vision to their LAN switches as well.
Here at ConSentry, we took advantage of the timing to add to the industry discussion about LANs getting smarter. On Monday, we took the wraps off our vision for Intelligent Switching, with user and application control built into the switch. We were founded – and funded – to build the next-gen switch, with built-in security and control features. We took the pragmatic step of building an appliance first, to make customer adoption easier, but with this announcement we were able to fully detail our original vision and show how it fits within these broader industry changes. We highlighted the differences between the legacy and intelligent switch architectures – the latter having knowledge of user identity, device, role, application, and destination native in the switch. This intelligence gives IT business context like never before, which simplifies tasks like limiting access to resources or troubleshooting user or application problems.
A lot of publications picked up on this trend toward greater intelligence, including the San Jose Mercury News and Network World. And we may not be done with the news for the week. Rumors continue to swirl about, as one analyst put it, one more “monumental” announcement, after which the switch landscape is supposed to look very different. Regardless of whether more news comes, though, this week’s already seen a sea change in what’s state of the state, and for the first time in a long time, IT has more than the commodity switch feature set to think about when investigating switches for their next LAN upgrade.
As the saying goes, may you live in interesting times. At least in LAN switching, it would appear we are. Sure makes this all a lot more fun.
--Michelle McLean
mmclean-at-consentry-dot-com
