Reviewing the highlights of Ethernet's first four decades

Ethernet's value to networking and IT is well established over the past 40 years. But did you know that "Ethernet" refers to two slightly different ways of sending information between endpoints on a LAN? That and some other perhaps lesser known facts about this 40-year-old technology are reviewed here:

Internet traffic will quadruple in five years and the number of mobile Internet connections will exceed the world's population by 2017, according to Cisco research.

Huawei this week unveiled a high-end upgrade to its CloudEngine core switch, which debuted here at Interop a year ago.

Cloud scaling will be all the switching rage at this week’s Interop. Three major vendors last week took their platforms deeper into and then beyond the data center, outdueling each other on server access density and software programmability, two key attributes needed for the virtualized goldmine called the cloud. And in so doing, they have raised the bar and perhaps set the stage for one of the more anticipated announcements in SDN switching from Cisco spin-in Insieme.

Juniper Networks this week will extend its SDN offerings with the release of its controller, roughly six months ahead of schedule.

Arista is raising the ante in high-density programmable core switching and perhaps setting the stage for things to come.

Brocade this week extended its data center networking portfolio with hardware and software enhancements designed to better integrate and align physical and virtual resources.

HP this week refreshed its switch line and fortified its SDN portfolio with three new systems and a router, along with management and provisioning software extensions.

Charles W. Berger is the beleaguered company's new president and CEO.

Jonathan Davidson took over Juniper campus and data center switching when the two previously separate business units were combined following the departure of founding engineer R.K. Anand. Davidson has a service provider routing background at Juniper and Cisco, which is no coincidence -- after five years in switching, Juniper has been unable to mirror the success it had in its first five years in service provider routing. But it did start from zero and surpassed at least six other incumbent vendors to attain the No. 3 position in the market. The company has more than 20,000 switching customers cultivated through organic development, Davidson notes. And as Juniper moves forward amid a forklift upgrade facing its EX core switch base and after an initial misfire on the QFabric data center switch, it's focusing on customer demands for simplification, agility and automation. Davidson discussed some recent and future developments in Juniper enterprise switching.

IBM is asking that people judge the OpenDaylight SDN project by its accomplishments, not by its roster.

The third annual Open Networking Summit, an SDN conference organized by the Open Networking Foundation, convened this week just after ONF members Cisco and IBM unveiled a separate effort to define an open source SDN framework. Unlike the user-driven ONF, OpenDaylight is a vendor-driven project to cultivate a system of SDN applications, but it also raised suspicion of the group's real intent: Is it designed to stall SDN's momentum and the threat, real or perceived, it could pose to incumbent hardware vendors? ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt discussed some of these topics with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy at the Santa Clara, Calif., conference.

Cisco last week extended its datacentre product line to support Microsoft's Windows Server 2012 hypervisor and VM management features to more tightly align their respective datacentre and Cloud architectures for joint customers.

SDNs aren't just for data center networks, despite the best-use-case-scenario arguments for network virtualization and flow management pervading the industry.