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Cisco Live was not just about Cisco; the huge exposition included a broad assortment of partners, many of which had their own announcements to make at the event. Cisco Live, held in Las Vegas last week, drew more than 15,000 attendees and another 40,000 that dropped in virtually. Even HP, which was not in attendance, had something to say in response to Cisco's claims about its switches.
According to a statement from Mike Nielsen, director, solution marketing, HP Networking, Cisco's announcement on the update of its Catalyst switch is "too little, too late on the heels of HP's FlexNetwork architecture and the A10500 series announcements back in May." He said in an interview that the Catalyst 6500 has seen nothing more than incremental updates--many of which still require a full system replacement--instead of driving real innovation with a fully refreshed architecture.
As for Cisco's claims that it offers three times the performance at one-third the cost of ripping out a 6500 and replacing it with an HP switch, Nielsen stated the performance of HP's comparable products is "twice as high, if measured correctly. The price comparisons are also meaningless--Cisco's math is based on an upgrade of a product with a very limited install base versus a completely new installation."
Application performance management vendor ExtraHop Networks announced its virtual appliance for APM, the EH1000v. Offering a small-footprint solution for branch office deployments, it provides deep traffic analysis at 1-Gbps speeds for applications running in virtual and cloud environments.
Due out at the end of July, LiteScape Technologies' SmartRoute is billed as the first enterprise external call routing application to work with Cisco Unified Communication and Session Manager Enterprise Edition products. It enables flexible and secure routing decisions based on rules, phone patterns, presence, location, and calendar information.
Emulex announced that its LightPulse 8 Gbps Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) support Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers and MDS Fibre Channel switches. The Emulex LPe12002-M8-C 8 Gbps dual-channel Fibre Channel HBA (Cisco PID N2XX-AEPCI05) connects Cisco UCS C-Series servers to third-party storage area network (SAN) solutions, and is also qualified for use with MDS Fibre Channel switches.
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