It was just announced Riverbed will be acquiring OPNET.  With the growth of BYOD, Cloud, SDN, and Collaboration just to name a few of today’s hottest trends, it is now more important than ever before to have deeper visibility into both the network and the applications riding over the network.  For the mid-size Enterprise in my experience, they usually rely just on SNMP, WMI, and sometimes NetFlow to gain visibility to the network.  However, this data on its own is not enough to really know what’s going on throughout the network.  From my perspective, network and application performance management (APM) solutions are those that the incumbent network vendors should have been selling for the past decade.  These are what’s really needed.  How can you make a better network or make applications run smoother if there isn’t direct integration between the network and the applications (via an APM tool)?

I’ve been out of the Cisco world for a few months, but for the month of October, I’ve been trying to get re-focused as I watch the Yankees lose.  It’s been a month of several announcements, two of which I’ll focus on in this post:  the Nexus 1000V pricing update and the Cisco Edition of OpenStack.

Cisco 1000V Update

Early this month, Cisco made a major change to its pricing strategy for the Nexus 1000V virtual switch.  Prior to the announcement, the cost of the virtual switch was $695 list price per CPU.  It wasn’t a significant cost, but it was still a cost when you compare it to the no cost charge of using Open vSwitch (OVS).  Thanks to Nicira, well I guess VMware now, for the extreme focus on the development and success of OVS in the cloud and open source community.  Because of their work, it is now the standard offering in Citrix XenServer.