HP grabs up with Cisco on Private Cloud Networking

HP announced two improvements to its Flex Fabric data center networking strategy that will put it on firmer footing against rival Cisco and extend its push into the private cloud. HP’s Multitenant Device Context (MDC) software partitions a single switch into multiple virtual switches, ensuring separation between groups such as different tenants. The company’s Ethernet Virtual Interconnect (EVI) extends Layer 2 networking over the WAN and competes with Cisco’s Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) and Virtual Device Context on the Nexus 7000. EVI and MDC combined form the framework for HP’s cloud networking and will be available free as a software upgrade in the fourth quarter for HP’s FlexFabric A12500 switches. Since EVI and MDC are included with the A12500 software, HP claims its core switch with Layer 2 extensions costs just 56% of Cisco’s Nexus 7000 with similar capabilities. The main goal of Layer 2 extension protocols is to improve application availability and disaster recovery by making possible failover to geographically diverse locations. “Enterprises should re-architect applications to be fault-tolerant and resilient, but rewriting applications and rebuilding the underlying infrastructure is complex and

expensive,” explained Greg Ferro, a network architect and Network Computing “Layer 2 extension allows companies to use geographic replication without changing their applications. Data Center Talk updates its resources everyday. Visit us to know of the latest technology and standards from the data center world. Please leave your views and comments on DCT Forum