Earlier this year, we celebrated the first year anniversary for our open networking initiative with plenty of excitement and success. We firmly believe open networking is poised to change the industry, and are constantly working with our partners and customers to extend the boundaries of open networking over the past year.
Our open networking initiatives are a significant step in solving some of the key challenges faced by industry today including increasing network traffic, hindered by proprietary technology, and the best way to get to 100GbE. Our new open networking products, introduced last week, offer a complete portfolio of 1 to 100GbE switches to cover networks of any size. These new switches provide customers greater agility and flexibility with multi-rate 100GbE options. All of the announced switches support the Open Network Install Environment (ONIE) to all for a zero-touch install of all pre-qualified third party operating systems, including Dell Networking OS9.
Along with the new open networking switches, we also announced a new open networking ecosystem partner, IP Infusion. A leading provider of intelligent network software for telecom and data communications services, IP Infusion’s OcNOS™ is the first, full-featured network operating system for carrier, datacenter and enterprise networking and reduces operation complexity by bringing the power of the Open Compute Project to data networking.
The industry continues to acknowledge the innovative advances of our open networking initiative. In January this year, SearchNetworking.com, one of the largest and most active online communities dedicated to the enterprise network, recognized Dell with its monthly Network Innovation Award for its partnership with Cumulus. With this partnership, Dell became the first mainstream switch vendor to permit third party OSes to run on its switches. The publication noted, “As the broader IT industry moved away from infrastructure bounded by proprietary hardware and software, networking equipment vendors remained one of the last holdouts. But last year, Dell became the first major switch vendor to break that mold when it partnered with Cumulus Networks [.]”
Earlier this month, IT Brand Pulse, a trusted source for research, data and analysis about datacenter infrastructure, recognized Dell’s Open Networking switches with its 2015 Innovation Leaders award. We are especially proud of this honor because IT pros select the winners through independent, non-sponsored research surveys.
Moor Insights and Strategy, a leading analyst firm, also reaffirmed our open networking strategy. In its recently published paper titled ‘Fifty Shades of Open Networking’, Moor Insights noted that Dell has the broadest portfolio of open products that bring choice for SDN implementation… and also states that Dell appears to be the furthest along in enabling their products and aligning a clear marketing message.
These new products, partnerships and awards reaffirm our position as an open networking champion and innovator. While there is plenty of talk from other mainstream vendors about the benefits of open networking, we remain one of the most vocal and committed networking vendors to support the new networking paradigm.
To stay current and join the open networking conversation, follow us @DellNetworking on Twitter. Don’t forget to add the #OpenNetworking hashtag to your tweets.