AWS’ Transit Gateway Connect

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the largest public cloud provider by revenue. This year AWS hosted its annual re:Invent conference as a three-week event with lots of new services announced, including at least three major networking advancements with Transit Gateway Connect easily being the most impactful.

AWS Transit Gateway is a service that has been available for several years, providing a way for users to connect on-premises networks with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) instances in AWS. What hasn’t been easy though is deploying SD-WAN to enable VPC connectivity. Simply put, what AWS Transit Gateway Connect provides is a native approach to integrate SD-WAN appliances with AWS Transit Gateway.

This isn’t just AWS selling its own SD-WAN service either, it’s AWS enabling organizations to choose from a number of leading SD-WAN vendors that are all integrated with the AWS Transit Gateway Connect effort. Among those vendors are Arista, Aruba, Cisco, Citrix, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Silver Peak. So yes, it’s all of the major players. This is a big deal that quite literally changes the dynamics of SD-WAN in the AWS cloud.

Features of Transit Gateway Connect

Easily enabling SD-WAN connectivity in AWS will help to solve a real challenge that many organizations have had. It will also mean that new SD-WAN architectures that directly integrate VPC instances will be easier to deploy and it’s likely that more organizations now make broader use of the AWS cloud platform as a result.

AWS’ documentation on the new feature explains, “Transit Gateway Connect provides customers with added benefits such as improved bandwidth and supports dynamic routing with increased route limits, thus removing the need to set up multiple IPsec VPNs between the SD-WAN appliances and Transit Gateway. This simplifies the overall network design and reduces the associated operational cost.”

Other cloud vendors have had some SD-WAN integrations in the past, but none have really quite done (yet) what AWS has. That will change soon enough and it’s reasonable to expect that native SD WAN integration will be available in 2021 across all cloud vendors virtual private cloud-type platforms.

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What eBPF provides is a low-level interface to enable data packet transmission and control. On its own it has tremendous potential for networking. While there is lots of open source eBPF code now in the Linux kernel, on its own, it can be quite complex, which is where the open source Cilium project has been making inroads in the last few years.

I first wrote on Cilium in 2017, when the project first got started and the company behind it – Isovlanet – was still shrouded in stealth. Cilium and Isovalent are led by CEO and co-founder Dan Wendlandt, who helped to create the OpenStack Quantum networking project and was a pioneer in the Software Defined Networking (SDN) industry at VMware.

Last week, Isovalent emerged from stealth, along with $29 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Wendlandt and Andreessen Horowitz are hardly strangers; after he left VMware in 2016 he went to work as a partner at the venture capital firm, alongside fellow SDN pioneer and VMware alum Martin Casado.

Why an SDN Pioneer is Investing in eBPF

In a blog post announcing the investment in Isovalent, Casado said that with eBPF, it’s possible to write a program and embed it directly into the kernel. A common analogy: eBPF brings to the Linux kernel what JavaScript brought to the browser.

“With eBPF, you can see and control what is happening at the API level, showing the remote API calls being invoked and the data that they are being passed,” Casado wrote. “Cilium + eBPF is far more than API-aware visibility, it’s a fundamentally more powerful way to do networking in cloud environments, from traditional configurations on up, that allows for more robust program tracing, observability, and monitoring.”

That’s a fundamental shift from the legacy world of simply tracking data packets. The promise of eBPF is that networking isn’t just about moving packets, it’s about understanding what data is moving, how it can be controlled and how it can be secured.

In a cloud-native Kubernetes setting, eBPF and Cilium are already making significant inroads, and that’s why the company is raising money, so it can grow further with a commercially supported service. There are a lot of options for cloud networking and monitoring, but having kernel-level control is quite literally a new level of insight.

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IDC reported that the global Ethernet switch market posted $7.6 billion in fourth quarter 2019 revenue, a 2.1% year-over-year decline. The switch market decline is not as bad as what’s going on in the router market. IDC reported that the worldwide enterprise and service provider (SP) router market took in $4.2 billion in revenue for 4Q19, a 7.7% decline.

100GbE Growing

While the overall market is down, some segments of the switching market remain strong. In particular, 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switch revenue was up by 24.7% on shipments of 5.8 million ports, for $1.4 billion in revenue in 4Q19. 25GbE is also growing, with port shipments up by 57.1%.

10GbE, which has long been the cornerstone of data center and enterprise networks, is going the other way, with a revenue decline of 13.0% though the number of ports shipped grew by 7%.

“While the rise and spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, did not impact these 4Q19 results, it will not ease these pressures in the early part of 2020 where we expect this softness to continue,” stated Rohit Mehra, vice president for Network Infrastructure at IDC. “Despite these headwinds, enterprises are still prioritizing investments in digital platforms in order to transform their businesses and keep pace with competitors, which will ultimately continue to buoy spending in the networking market over the long term.”

Vendor Rankings

Cisco continues to dominate the switch market with a 50.9% market share, though it reported declining 4Q19 switch revenue, down by 6.4%.

Huawei holds a 9.6% share of the switch market on revenue growth of 8.9%, while Arista Network holds a 7.0% market share even after its 4Q19 revenue declined by 11.1%.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

The post Networking Market Slows with Declining Ethernet Switch, Router Revenue appeared first on Enterprise Networking Planet.

A key part of Mellanox’s strategy for 2020 is wide deployment of the company’s Spectrum-3 switch ASIC. Spectrum 3 can deliver up to 12.8 Tbps of Ethernet switching capacity and can support a full array of Ethernet ports, ranging from 1GbE all the way up to 400 GbE.

“Mellanox Spectrum-3 offers better performance, more advanced features, and easier management than any other 12.8 terabit switch,” stated Amit Katz, vice president of Ethernet switches at Mellanox.

Beyond just switching bandwidth, the Spectrum-3 has some interesting integrated visibility capabilities, including a feature Mellanox refers to as “What Just Happened (WJH).”

“This feature allows network operators to finally get instant answers to the 5 W’s – When, What, Who, Where and Why as soon as an issue arises,” Mellanox detailed in a specification sheet for the Spectrum-3. “‘What Just Happened’ is open and extendable, making it ideal for integration into third-party network monitoring and analysis tools. “

SN400 Switching Platform Now Shipping

As of March 9, Spectrum-3 is shipping to customers inside of the Mellanox SN4000 switching platform. The SN4000 is available in multiple form factors, including 32 ports of 400GbE, 64 ports of 200GbE and 128 ports of 100/50/25/10GbE.

“Over the last several years, with the Mellanox Spectrum and Mellanox Spectrum-2 product lines, Mellanox has steadily grown its market share in the 100GbE top-of-rack Ethernet switch segment,” stated Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research. “The introduction of these new Mellanox Spectrum-3 based switches should enable additional growth for Mellanox in the emerging 200GbE and 400GbE segments.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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While ADC network hardware is still the majority of F5 Network’s revenue, that’s not where the company is growing or where its future path is headed. Increasingly the path forward for F5 will be found in software, with a big push coming from the company’s NGINX division. F5 acquired NGINX for $670 million in a deal announced in March 2019.

The impact of a declining hardware market isn’t just anecdotal, it’s also borne out in F5’s financial results. For the first quarter of fiscal 2020 the company reported systems revenue of $170 million, which is an 11% year-over-year decline. Systems accounted for approximately 72% of product revenue in the quarter. In contrast software revenue grew by 50% in the quarter.

NGINX Controller 3.0

F5’s software efforts include software version of its ADC offerings, but the big hope from the company is growth from NGINX and more specifically from the new Controller 3.0 release.

“Controller is our orchestration and analytics solution for NGINX,”François Locoh-Donou, President and CEO of F5 Networks said during his company’s first quarter 2020 earnings call. “It simplifies how enterprises manage, monitor, and automate large scale NGINX deployments.”

Controller is particularly important as it brings together capabilities that F5 was working on prior to its acquisition of NGINX. Locoh-Donou noted that F5 was working on a cloud-native virtual ADC offering that featured an application-centric design. Immediately after the close of the NGINX acquisition in May 2019, F5 merged the team working on its cloud-native project with the NGINX controller development team.

“Controller 3.0 shifts the center of gravity from the instance of infrastructure supporting the app, to the application itself,” he said. “When we look at the future of F5, we’re more confident now than ever before that NGINX will be a meaningful software growth driver.”

The Shape of Things to Come

NGINX isn’t the only vendor that F5 Networks has recently acquired. On Jan. 24, F5 completed the acquisition of Shape Security in a deal valued at approximately $1billion. Locoh-Donou commented that Shape Security is a leader in anti-fraud and abuse protection, solving a mission critical problem for large enterprises.

“With Shape, we will expand our ability to optimize and protect customers’ applications in an increasingly complex multi-cloud world,” he said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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Open Argus has its roots in the Argus network flow system that was developed in the 1980s at Georgia Tech. The effort had been privately funded as an open source effort and is now benefiting from the sponsorship of CounterFlow AI, which will also be building a commercial solution that integrates Argus.

Randy Caldejon, CEO and co-founder of CounterFlow, told Enterprise Networking Planet that CounterFlow recently implemented a 40Gbps network visibility solution for a customer based on Argus. He noted that the proof-of-concept proved to be a huge success and as a result, CounterFlow is basing the ThreatEye sensor it is delivering on a modified version of Argus.

“Argus extracts data features from network traffic that is typically included with the netflow v9 data model plus much more,” Caldejon said. “In addition, Argus extracts packet dynamic measurements like round-trip time, TCP state statistics, inter-packet arrival times, jitter, payload size distribution, producer-consumer ratio, and key stroke identification.”

Adding AI to Network Flow Data

CounterFlow is in the business of providing machine learning enhanced network visibility. As part of the sponsorship, Caldejon said that CounterFlow is collaborating with Carter Bullard, the maintainer of Argus, to integrate machine learning technology with Argus.

“More specifically, CounterFlow’s contribution is software called raml, which is an Argus client that can apply streaming analytics based on machine learning to the Argus flow record stream at wire-speed,” he explained. “CounterFlow plans to publish the first release of the software this month.”

The big challenge for network visibility is that as the industry trends to more encrypted traffic, traditional cybersecurity solutions like firewalls and intrusion detection systems are losing visibility into network traffic. Caldejon explained that CounterFlow AI is addressing the growing network visibility gap by employing cryptanalysis techniques to identify patterns associated with network faults, anomalies, and threats.

“In our case, cryptanalysis means discovering hidden patterns about network traffic without cracking the encryption key,” Caldejon said. “We do this by analyzing network traffic with streaming machine learning using the rich flow and packet dynamics features that Argus generates.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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Hardware innovation is at the core of Cisco’s ‘Internet of the Future’ technology strategy announced on Dec. 11 with new hardware innovations including the Silicon One networking chip, the Cisco 8000 routing platform and the IOS XR7 network operating system. In a press event announcing the new technologies, Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said that the technologies have been in development for over five years and are intended to help accelerate traffic, and enable more bandwidth.

“The bandwidth that we continue to provide at the access layer the edge of the network is going to just get faster and faster and faster and faster,” Robbin said. “When that happens, that puts a lot of pressure on the backbone networks.

Silicon One

The Silicon One chip is being positioned by Cisco as the foundation of Cisco’s future routing platforms, offering the promise of up to 25 Terabits per second (Tbps).

The Silicon One is far from the first time Cisco has announced new silicon and a new routing platform to meet growing bandwidth demand. 15 years ago, Cisco announced the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System) which was succeeded by the CRS-3 in 2010 and the CRS-X in 2013. At the top end, the CRS-X boasted performance of 12.8 Tbps. At the core of the CRS platform in recent has been a Cisco silicon innovation known as the Quantum Flow processor that was first announced in 2008.

With the Silicon One, Cisco is doing more than it has with some of its past silicon innovations, providing not just more bandwidth, but also more customization capabilities with support for the P4 network programming language, that can be used to help define a logical data plane pipeline.

8800 Series Routers

The Silicon One chip will first land in the new Cisco 8000 series routers, which include both fixed and modular options. The top end of the series is the 8818 router which is 33 Rack Unit (RU) chassis, packing in up to 36 x 400 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) or 48 x 100 GbE line cards. The maximum rated bandwidth for the 8818 according to Cisco is 259.2 Tbps.

Analyst Patrick Moorhead sees the new Cisco effort as potentially solving many customer problems.

“It’s one architecture for many networking use cases which translates to a focused software platform, not three or four,” Moorhead stated. “Cisco will have to prove this one silicon architecture can scale up and down, but that’s where the 8000 Series comes into play.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanetPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

The post Cisco Announces New Silicon, Routers and OS for 2020 and Beyond appeared first on Enterprise Networking Planet.

For the second quarter of 2019, analyst firm IDC reported global revenues from Ethernet switch vendors reached $7.07 billion for a 4.8 percent year-over-year gain. Router revenues also grew, albeit at a slow pace of of 3.4 percent, for quarterly revenue of $3.96 billion.

In the switch market, growth is largely being driven by higher speed Ethernet platform including 100 GbE and 25 GbE. IDC reported that 100 GbE switch revenue in the second quarter was $1.28 billion for a 42.9 percent year-over-year gain. The revenue growth was driven by 100 GbE port shipments that expanded by 58.3 percent to 4.4 million. 100 GbE now represents 18.1 percent of the total revenue in the global Ethernet switch market.

Also growing fast are revenues and port shipments for 25 GbE, with shipments growing by 74.5 percent and revenue hitting $364.1 million for an 84.8 percent gain. In contrast, 10 GbE port shipment only grew by 2.6 percent.

IDC isn’t the only analyst firm that is seeing growth for 25 GbE. Dell’Oro Group also highlighted 25 GbE in its Controller and Adapter 2Q 2019 quarterly report .

“25 Gbps continues to gain momentum across key vendors in the high-end Enterprise market,” said Baron Fung, Director, at Dell’Oro Group. “Among the major Cloud service providers, which generally deploy 25, 40, and 50 Gbps ports, growth was mixed, as select companies are still undergoing server capacity digestion. Thus, we continue to anticipate great volatility in this sector for these higher speed ports.”

Vendors

Leading the switch market once again is Cisco, coming in with 51.1 percent market share by revenue, building off a 6.8 percent year-over-year increase in revenue.

Chinese network equipment vendor Huawei, which is under pressure by various governments around the world ranked second with a total switch market revenue share of 9.7 percent. Arista Networks holds done the number three slot with a 7.3 percent market share.

“Network transformation remains a top priority for enterprises around the globe as they look to expand their businesses and delight customers with agile connectivity,” Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure wrote in a statement. “Increasingly, organizations are realizing the critical role modernizing the network plays in creating a digital business, which will continue to drive growth in the Ethernet switching and enterprise router platforms into the foreseeable future.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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According to IHS Markit’s Data Center Network Equipment Market Tracker, revenue for SD-WAN, which includes appliance and control management software grew in the first quarter of 2019 by 8 percent. Among the key area of growth for SD-WAN technology are mobile and remote workers.

“Enterprises want to ensure that employees who are remote or mobile still have high levels of connectivity for SaaS-based applications,” stated Josh Bancroft, senior research analyst at IHS Markit. “Application traffic is required to traverse over multiple links to ensure failover for voice and video sessions where constant connectivity is essential, such as for home office-based customer service agents or medical first responders.”

Bancroft added that it is imperative for SD-WAN vendors to have compact SD-WAN appliances to seize the growing market opportunity. Additionally, IHS Markit has found that financial services organizations are rearchitecting their WANs with SD-WAN to utilize traffic-routing segmentation features.

“This ensures that traffic containing sensitive customer data is separated from other network traffic, increasing data security and aiding in demonstrating payment card industry (PCI) compliance,” Bancroft said.

Vendors

The big winner so far in the SD-WAN market is VMware with a 20 percent share. VMware entered the SD-WAN market in 2017 via the acquisition of VeloCloud

Coming in second is Cisco at 13 percent, which also bolstered its SD-WAN efforts via acquisition in 2017, picking up Viptela for $610 million. Rounding out the top three is Aryaka at 12 percent

SD-WAN Trends

There are a number of key trends that are driving the SD-WAN market forward, according to the 2019 SD-WAN Market Trends Survey from Masergy conducted in partnership with IDG Research.

The survey found that the need to optimize the network is a top objective for companies moving to SD-WAN as is the need to improve security. 46 percent of survey respondents noted that network management simplification was the top expected benefit of SD-WAN adoption.

While the SD-WAN market is growing there are still some challenges.

“The lingering skills gaps remain a top barrier to adoption, whereas concerns regarding WAN interoperability with existing WANs have receded since 2017, the report stated. “Organizations are concerned with ensuring that they have the requisite skill set available in their IT staff for successful SD-WAN implementation and management.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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Wi-Fi 6 was formerly known as the 802.11ax Wi-Fi standard and offers the promise of faster connectivity than the current 802.11ac standard that is already widely deployed by Cisco and other networking vendors. Among the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 are increased data rates, reduced latency, higher density and improved power efficiency over existing Wi-Fi access points.

“Every leap in connectivity enables the next wave of profound innovation. 5G and Wi-Fi 6 represent a new era of connectivity,” David Goeckeler, EVP and General Manager, Networking and Security Business at Cisco said. “Developers are already creating the next generation of wireless-first, immersive experiences. With billions of things connecting to the network, this growth will create unprecedented complexity for IT.”

Cisco’s Wi-Fi Hardware

Cisco’s new Wi-Fi 6 enabled hardware includes the Cisco Catalyst 9100 series and the Cisco Meraki MR 45/55 access points. Catalyst is Cisco’s mainline of traditional hardware, while Meraki is the cloud managed product lineup.

Within the Cisco Catalyst 9100 portfolio, there are three APs, including the 9115, 9117 and 9210 devices. The 9115 is a 4×4 device with one 2.5 Gbps multigig wired ethernet port, while the 9117 is an 8×8 with one 5 Gbps multigig wired port. Both the 9115 and the 9117 are positioned by Cisco as being ideal for small to medium sized deployments.

In contrast the 9120 is a mission critical Wi-Fi 6 AP that integrates Cisco’s RF ASIC chip which provides the next generation of CleanAir functionality. Cisco has been deploying its’ CleanAir technology in APs since at least 2010, providing organizations with a capability to detect and route around wireless interference.

All of the new Catalyst APs also integrate the next generation Bluetooth 5 standard, which is important for enabling connectivity with certain types of Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

Catalyst 9600

With Wi-Fi 6 there is a need for more backend switching capacity infrastructure, which is a need that Cisco is looking to meet with its new Catalyst 9600 series switches.

The Catalyst 9600 can support up to 25.6 Tbps of wired switching capacity in a single chassis. In terms of ports, the modular system can support up to 48 ports of 100 Gigabit Ethernet and 192 25/10 Gigabit Ethernet ports. The Catalyst 9600 plugs into Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) to enable a Software-Defined Access (SD-Access) approach for agile networking delivery.

“The new Catalyst 9600 modular core switch addresses the demands of Wi-Fi 6, mGig speeds, and security in a cloud-driven world,” said Sachin Gupta Senior Vice President, Product Management at Cisco Enterprise Networking. “This switch will serve as a foundation for the next generation of multi-domain, Intent Based Networks, and will allow customers to create a wireless-first network built as a single fabric for wired and wireless.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

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