Hardware Strikes Back
The software-defined data center may be all the rage, but plenty of vendors are proving there’s still a place in the business world for innovative hardware — provided that the hardware is paired with sophisticated software, of course. Last week, CRN took a look at 10 of the newest software products that are changing enterprise IT, and here we’ll be doing the same for the world of hardware. What follows are 10 hardware products, all of which have been unveiled since February, that are moving the enterprise data center into the future. Recurring themes include all-flash, hyper-convergence and next-gen switching.
Here are 10 of the newest hardware products changing IT that solution providers should know about.
Arista 7500R Series
This new line of modular switches from Arista Networks introduced a new architecture with a snazzy name — Universal Spine — in March. What that means is that Arista wants its new hardware to serve as the nerve center for next-generation networks, whether for cloud service providers or enterprise data centers. The system comes with 115 terabytes-a-second fabric and up to 432 100GB Ethernet ports (for the top-of-the-line 7512R switch) for high performance. The system also combines routing with its switching — marking Arista’s first foray into routing — with new FlexRoute software that can accommodate up to 1 million internet routes.
Barefoot Tofino
If Barefoot Networks is right, the concept of software-defined networking should extend all the way down to the level of switching chips. Their Tofino chips are the world’s first “fully user-programmable” switching chips; that is, the chips themselves can be programmed to the liking of the network owner, meaning that networks can be much more finely tuned to their specific processing needs. The bottom line, according to Barefoot Networks, is that Tofino allows “network designers and architects to create the features they need in their own networks” while “making those features transportable across different switching systems.”
Cisco Tetration
As CRN’s Mark Haranas reported in June,Cisco’s new Tetration Analytics platform aims to provide more intelligence about what’s going on inside a data center — network flows and application insights, for instance — to enable companies to more quickly shift to software-defined networking. But to get to this software-defined future, customers will still need some hardware sensors to help Tetration do its thing. The first iteration of Tetration will be deployed by channel partners as a full-stack appliance, starting in July.
EMC Unity
Unity — which includes both all-flash and hybrid flash versions — is aimed at delivering “order-of-magnitude leaps in performance and simplicity” for storage, EMC said when it launched the product in May. At EMC Platinum partner Presidio, Chief Technology Officer Vinu Thomas agrees with that appraisal. Unity is “massively simplified” compared with previous products by bringing together support for both file and block protocols, he said. Meanwhile, customers that have deployed Unity so far are “definitely seeing an improvement in performance,” Thomas said. “The whole Unity architecture is built from the ground up. … It is an absolute dramatic shift.”
HPE ProLiant Gen9
Hewlett Packard Enterprise — aka, the world’s market-share leader on servers, according to researcher IDC — made some big upgrades to two of its servers in March, aimed at more easily connecting on-premise data centers to the cloud.The updated ProLiant DL360 and ProLiant DL380 servers feature new capabilities around management, security and storage to that effect, HPE told CRN’s Joseph Kovar. The company said the ninth-generation ProLiant servers also include boosted performance via Intel’s newest Broadwell processor, the Xeon E5-2600 v4.
Nimble AF-Series
Nimble Storage in February launched an all-flash storage array for the first time, the Nimble AF-Series — and as CRN’s Joseph Kovar reported at the time, the arrays include the InfoSight predictive analytics technology that Nimble has made its name on with hybrid flash arrays. That technology aims to enable Nimble customers to better manage their storage — and better prevent downtime — in addition to providing the fast performance that flash is known for, according to the company.
7 Hot New Hardware Products For Enterprise IT 24
