Enterasys is rolling out its enterprise networking
fabric play, OneFabric, which will look to challenge such heavyweights
as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks.
Enterasys officials unveiled their OneFabric
architecture Oct. 17, saying their strategy offers a more complete and
less complex solution than those from their competitors.
“There are other solutions out there, but none of
them give an end-to-end view of services,” Ram Appalaraju, vice
president of marketing at Enterasys, said in an interview with eWEEK,
adding that similar offerings from other vendors are “fragmented,”
vendor-specific and lack the ability to offer a single view of the
entire infrastructure, from the data center to mobile user environments.
Enterasys’ OneFabric is designed to enable
businesses to provision the entire network with greater performance and
security and manage it all through a single point. The capabilities
touch on everything from traditional data centers to cloud
environments, and from virtual machines to mobile devices. The
OneFabric initiative will enable businesses to flatten their networking
infrastructure, reduce costs and simplify operations, according to
Appalaraju.
The solution also enables enterprises to adopt it
as their needs grow, rather than having to adopt it all at once and
replace networking products they’ve already invested heavily in.
Enterasys gives IT administrators three OneFabric solutions they can
adopt: OneFabric Data Center, OneFabric Edge and OneFabric Security.
Enterasys’ OneFabric solution can help
businesses cut management overhead needs by 90 percent and scale to
meet the growing demands coming out of increasingly virtualized data
centers, according to company officials.
Businesses can leverage Enterasys’ new OneFabric
Control Center, the central console through which they can manage the
entire fabric, and which includes integration with virtual
infrastructures from VMware, Citrix Systems and Microsoft, aimed at
improving network performance in virtualized data centers.
OneFabric offers tight integration with workflows
in virtulization and storage environments, and offers more efficient
and less complex application delivery.
Network fabrics have become a driving force in the
industry, primarily since Juniper introduced what would become its
QFabric initiative several years ago, according to Zeus Kerravala,
former Yankee Group analyst and now principal analyst with ZK Research.
Now most players are jumping into the fabric competition, driving
innovation in a sector of the IT industy where little had existed
before.
“Over the past decade, switching hasn’t been all
that exciting,” Kerravala wrote in a blog in April. “Differentiation
was built on either being slightly faster than Cisco (Brocade) or
slightly cheaper than Cisco (HP) but essentially all the products
looked the same.”
Now vendors are expanding their reach and offering
fabric portfolios with some real differentiation, all aimed at data
centers that are increasingly virtualizing and converging their data
centers. For example, Cisco has rolled out its Fabric Path portfolio,
Juniper has QFabric, HP its FlexNetwork strategy and Avaya has VENA,
or Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture. Now users have Enterasys’
OneFabric portfolio to consider. The innovation and differentiation in
these offerings makes at the networking fabric space an exciting one,
according to Kerravala.
“The solutions are different enough, and it's
important enough that I think it’s not a slam dunk that Cisco wins; and
the market is wide open now to the vendor that can prove a distinct
advantage in the evolution of the data center,” he wrote.
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