HPE And HP Throw Support Behind Arista In Vicious Legal Battle With Cisco

Printer-friendly version Email this CRN article #HewlettPackardEnterprise and #HewlettPackard are publicly supporting #AristaNetworks in its contentious legal battle with #Cisco. The nearly three-year long legal saga between the networking rivals has resulted in the ban of importation and sale of some of Arista's network products, including switches, into the United States. "Don't be fooled, [ #HPE ] has a big investment in Arista and these lawsuits could hurt them down the line if Cisco ultimately wins in one way or another," said one top executive from a solution provider and longtime HPE partner, who declined to be identified. Arista has filed an emergency appeal with the Federal Circuit to repeal the sales and import ban, citing a decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that found Cisco's patents in the case invalid. [Related: CRN Exclusive: 'Clarity' Comes To Cisco's Cloud Strategy With New Hybrid Cloud Blueprint For Partners] On Sept. 1, the Unified Patents organization officially filed an amici brief joined by HPE, HP and several other companies, including consumer electronics vendor Vizio and Cable Technology Laboratories, to the Federal Circuit saying it was in the public's best interest to promote "fair and free competition." Although the PTAB found Cisco's patents invalid, the International Trade Commission (ITC) left the ban in place pending a full review. "The public interest is disserved by enforcement of invalid patent claims," said the brief. "The ITC's obligation to consider the impact of its powerful remedies on the public interest, limited exclusion orders should be suspended, rescinded." The failure to consider PTAB's decision is "inequitable and improper," according to the brief. In a statement to CRN, Cisco said it's a "strong champion" of the PTAB's work, "but the ITC got it right keeping the import and sales bans in place based on the unique facts." "Not only did the ITC find Cisco's patents valid and infringed after a full trial, but Arista prevented the PTAB from considering a complete record, including what the ITC characterized as Arista's 'culture of copying Cisco.'" Both HPE and Arista declined to comment on the matter. In September 2016, HPE and Arista formed a strategic software-defined infrastructure partnership and sales pact with Arista. Under the terms of the pact, Arista will be HPE's preferred networking partner in data center networking as an infrastructure foundation for HPE's software-defined infrastructure offerings. HPE, which already had a converged architecture agreement with Arista, allowed solution providers and customers the ability to buy the Arista network switching products directly from HPE.
http://www.crn.com/news/networking/300091756/hpe-and-hp-throw-support-behind-arista-in-vicious-legal-battle-with-cisco.htm

How Cloud Is Changing IT Investment Planning

IT roadmaps are shifting as technologies like cloud, containers, and #softwaredefinedinfrastructure change where and how enterprise resources are consumed and managed. Is the cloud causing corporate technology deployments to speed up or slow down? The answer is both. Roadmaps once defined by three-year depreciation and upgrade cycles now have time horizons between 12 and 18 months. In reviewing IT roadmaps during the last 5 years, we've seen the pace of change in cloud capabilities and growth of larger cloud footprints lead to accelerated investment in areas that a few years ago were considered questionable. Investment has also slowed in areas that were once near certainties. Our analysis points to three major investment shifts across the next 18 months. From cloud-skeptical to cloud-first Just a few years ago, most corporate IT departments restricted investment in public cloud services to a limited set of use cases, like temporary number-crunching for large datasets. Today, even highly regulated companies have declared a "cloud-first" strategy, in which the public cloud is the default option for new development. This summer, we gathered data from 107 IT leaders across eight countries about the technologies they have in pilot today and are planning for 2017. Not surprisingly, the largest category of active pilots involved cloud services. What was surprising was that several of these pilots were for capabilities that were not on most roadmaps a year ago, such as cloud-based disaster recovery.

http://www.informationweek.com/data-centers/how-cloud-is-changing-it-investment-planning/a/d-id/1327646

HPE's composable initiative expands, customers & partners align

Hewlett Packard Enterprise ( #HPE ) has expanded on its composable initiative with the addition of a new hybrid cloud offering and technology extensions to HPE #hyperconverged systems. The organisation is enabling IT operators to deliver software-defined infrastructure as quickly as customers’ businesses demand. The new solutions include #HPESynergy with HPE #Helion CloudSystem 10 and an update to the HPE Hyper Converged Operating Environment software. Raj Thakur, director of Data Centre and Hybrid Cloud at Hewlett Packard Enterprise South Pacific, says their customers need change quite rapidly, and they need an infrastructure platform that can support that rapid change. “With HPE Synergy we delivered a new class of infrastructure providing the speed, efficiency and flexibility of the public cloud on-premises, so IT can focus on being an internal service provider instead of maintaining infrastructure,” he explains. “Now we’re extending composable infrastructure to our cloud and hyper-converged offerings, making hybrid IT simple for customers.” HPE Synergy already attained 100 early access customers that have successfully implemented it across a variety of industries, and is now broadly available for order in all regions. Colin Miles, VP of Data Centre Technology, at Liberty Global, says that in order to meet the ever-changing needs of mobile, television and broadband customers across Europe, their organisation turned to HPE for help. “As a HPE Synergy early access customer, our team was able to quickly explore the innovative solution to help us deliver infrastructure as code, working towards giving us the cloud-like experience we were looking for in our data entre,” explains Miles. According to HPE, both HPE Synergy and HPE Helion CloudSystem 10 both incorporate HPE OneView, the organisations infrastructure automation management software. This enables more efficient infrastructure utilisation by empowering IT to target the right infrastructure for the right workloads. Customers can also take advantage of the broad ecosystem HPE has developed through the Composable Infrastructure Partner Program. Partners like #Microsoft, #VMware, #SUSE and #RedHat are all accessible through integration with the #HPE #OneView API.

Intel® Server Products for Cloud Simplifying Access to Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) Solutions

Research shows that 80% of workloads will run on #cloud architecture by 2024.¹ To successfully navigate the transition to #privatecloud, customers need a software-defined infrastructure ( #SDI ) that is automated, resilient, and extensible. Intel is working to make it easier for resellers to meet customer needs and gain access to the SDI market with Intel® Server Products for Cloud. These fully-validated, pre-configured server systems feature: #Intel ® Server Boards and Chassis Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v4 family Intel® Solid State Drives ( #SSD ) Third-party memory ISV software certifications
http://www.intelserveredge.com/sdi/

Lenovo's Software Defined Infrastructure Strategy Comes Together With Red Hat and Nutanix

In January, I spent a few days with the senior leadership team of #Lenovo ’s enterprise group in Raleigh North Carolina. A lot of the players have changed since then, but what has been consistent is Lenovo’s objective to provide broader enterprise solutions. Most of my questions at Lenovo’s analyst conference were about software and where they were going with #SoftwareDefinedInfrastructure, or #SDI.

SDI is the hottest thing that has hit the enterprise since the web and Moor Insights & Strategy has been covering it for four years before it became cool to do so. The promise of SDI is to convert IT to a more “public cloud-like” model inside the enterprise with the goals to speed up app deployment and make it more flexible, provide a public-cloud like charging mechanism, and reduce costs versus more proprietary solutions. In terms of maturity, I would say we are in the third inning of a nine inning baseball game. New #hyperscale deployments are fully SDI while larger enterprise have completed POCs (proof of concepts) and are beginning their deployments. Small and medium businesses are kicking the tires.

With this latest #Nutanix announcement, we’re seeing Lenovo, traditionally seen as a hardware company, partnering with multiple SDI companies to deliver hyperconverged infrastructure solutions to the enterprise market. As a result of this latest announcement, Lenovo and Nutanix will work together to create a new family of Lenovo hyperconverged appliances utilizing Nutanix’s software designed to run virtualized apps and provide a storage platform, too. This is in addition to Lenovo’s cloud announcement with #RedHat to deliver new complete #OpenStack-based SDI solutions to Lenovo’s customers.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2015/11/20/lenovos-software-defined-infrastructure-strategy-comes-together-with-redhat-and-nutanix/