This article is more than 1 year old

Brace yourselves, netadmins, there's a new cable on the market

Meet our new roundup of networking news, this week feat. Cisco, Juniper and more

This week's network-news-in-five minutes has Palo Alto Networks acquiring a startup, a slew of Cisco switches, Juniper's fabric fetish, network monitoring and more.

First up: Palo Alto Networks has dropped US$300 million on the table to slurp cloud security company Evident.io.

Evident.io focuses on providing security assessment and risk compliance services to users of AWS and Azure. It scans the services for software with vulnerabilities, reports the vulnerabilities with code snippets, and identifies which users may have introduced the risks into the environment.

The five-year-old company's technology will be assimilated into Palo Alto's cloud security platform, Evident.io's Tim Prendergast blogged.

In its canned statement, Palo Alto says the Evident Security Platform (ESP) will be matched with its VM-Series virtualised firewalls, extending Palo Alto's API-based security.

Palo Alto says the integration would provide continuous monitoring, storage security, and validating/reporting against compliance rules.

Prendergast and his co-founder Justin Lundy will make the journey to Palo Alto with their company.

WhatsUp, doc?

Cloudy performance monitor Ipswitch added AWS, Azure, Outlook365, Dell Compellant storage, and Cisco Meraki cloud-managed Wi-Fi to its supported platforms.

Ipswitch said its WhatsUp Gold 2018 runs an auto-discovery across a customer's physical, virtual, and cloud network from a single tool.

Other environments it monitors includes Windows/Linux servers, hypervisors, storage NetApp and EMC, wireless devices, Web servers, Java, and applications.

Iron for SMEs

Cisco has dropped a bunch of switches for SME customers, the 250 Series and 350 Series.

Switchzilla says the 350 Series is pitched at companies planning 802.11ac Wave 2 WiFi. There are 16 models in the range, with variants running from 8 to 48 ports of 100 Mbps Ethernet, or from 10 to 52 ports of 1 Gbps Ethernet, and support for 2.5 Gbps and 5 Gbps ports to connect faster WiFi access points over existing cabling.

To power the access points, the switches support 60W power-over-Ethernet, and other specs can be found here.

The switch is designed to pair with the WAP581 802.11ac Wave 2 access point.

The 250 Series has 100 Mbps or 1 Gbps Ethernet ports in configurations from eight to 50 ports with gigabit or 10 Gbps uplinks, 30W power-over-ethernet, and all the tedious detail you could ever want here.

Metro photonics from Juniper

Juniper Networks announced what it called Metro Fabric, which combines a couple of “refreshed” routers with a “disaggregated programmable photonic layer”.

The two routers in question are two versions of the ACX Series Universal Metro Routers and the PTX Series Packet Transport Routers. All three, the company said, focus on network operators' need for automation.

The photonic layer comprises two products. First, there's the TCX1000 programmable reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer (ROADM), which supports 128 channels per fibre for a total 25.6 Tbps per-line throughput.

The ROADM has an API to the other part of the launch, the proNX Optical Director management system.

Be still, heart, Corning's got a new fibre

Two new fibres, in fact: one for long-haul networks and one for data centres.

The TXF is a low-loss, large effective-area fibre for terrestrial long-haul networks, supporting 100 Gbps and 200 Gbps protocols with longer spans and reach to reduce the number of repeaters needed.

The data centre (and carrier exchange) ribbon cable, RocketRibbon, packs up to 3,456 fibres in the same diameter as existing central and stranded-tube cables, the company said. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like