The new SKUs add TAA compliance for resonance in the government market, ONIE SKUs to appeal to those who want a third-party, typically open source OS, and reverse airflow options which some telcos prefer.
Netgear is highlighting the Orbi Pro Mesh Wi-Fi Ceiling satellite, which has received a CES Innovation Award nomination, but the announcement includes multiple products for the channel SMB space.
Lenovo is the last major infrastructure vendor to join the roster of Cumulus partners. They will offer three ThinkSystem RackSwitch models with support for Cumulus Linux out of the gate, with more coming in 2019.
Linksys believes that the Linksys Cloud Manager, aimed at the sub-100 market, will be highly disruptive in the small business space. The cloud launch is also being accompanied by a channel push in Canada, which will see product authorized for the first time.
The Dell EMC Z9264F-ON is the new version of the company’s core and aggregation switch, replacing the Z9100, and has twice the number of ports of its predecessor.
HPE rolls out the Cisco-based version of the next-gen 32GB FC switch, following the launch of the Brocade-based B-series last month.
Extreme Networks believes that the addition of AI and simplicity to the edge, the unification of campus and distributed architectures, and the choice that customers now have between an appliance and as-a-service, will make it easier for partners to have conversations with customers about business problems rather than networking challenges.
The HPE Smart Fabric Orchestrator provides the same capabilities for Ethernet that HP’s Smart SAN does for Fibre Channel, while the new M-Series SN2010M is a smaller switch for the secondary storage market.
Metaswitch has entered into vendor reseller agreements that go beyond technical integrations before, but this is their first one in the Composable Network Protocol part of their business.
In addition to new SMB-focused server, storage, networking and hyper-converged product, HPE has brought their Consume IT OPEX pricing model from the enterprise to SMBs as well.
The M-Series family OEMed from Mellanox, which provide 100 GbE Ethernet connectivity, but also scale down to an SMB price point, provide HPE with a strong channel offering that has a large price-performance differential over Fibre Channel.
Netgear’s new smart cloud offering provides a free app and a free subscription for a basic version. New switches and APs are required though, and a paid version with unlimited device support and additional features will be available early next year.
Dell EMC recently made their X-Series network switch products their first distribution-only product, but while they will look at doing this with other products and services, don’t expect it to start a trend.
Aerohive introduced a new, value-focused model on two of their entry level APs earlier this year as a test case. Results were positive and it has been extended across the whole portfolio, including high end solutions.
These include the first Dell EMC 25GbE Open Networking top-of-rack switch, for the high end, a new switch with Fibre Channel connectivity, and a new 1/10GbE switch for SME environments.
The new series, a complete redesign rather than an upgrade of the series it replaces, is also priced at around half what similar switches used to go for, which Zyxel thinks will help it with small business customers.
Mellanox thinks the Nutanix partnership can let Mellanox do for networking what Nutanix has already done for storage and compute – make it invisible. They also think it can grow their Ethernet switch business from the single digits to the neighborhood of their market leadership in Ethernet adapters.
Adding networking to the server, storage and virtualization capabilities of their HC3 solution gives Scale a complete bundle that responds to customer requests for such an addition.
The new Dell networking OS is initially aimed only at large data centres, with the current campus OS6 and data centre OS9 continuing, but longer term, OS 10 will become the core system for all of Dell networking.
Dell also previewed a new integrated management of Dell Networking X-Series switches through the Dell SonicWALL firewall interface through a single pane of glass, which will be available in 2016.
