Gartner Blog Network

Cool Network Vendors 2017

by Andrew Lerner  |  April 18, 2017

Every year, we publish Cool Vendors in Enterprise Networking to highlight lesser-known vendors doing cool things in the networking market. Coolness is certainly subjective, and my wife (or anyone who knew me...

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The “C” in OCP Is for Coolness

by Andrew Lerner  |  March 22, 2016

This is a guest blog from Joe Skorupa There has been a lot of coverage of the latest Open Compute announcements by Facebook, Google and Microsoft. Some saw these announcements...

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Branded Switching + White-Box Switching = Brite-Box Switching

by Andrew Lerner  |  November 19, 2014

White-Box Switching and Disaggregation There’s been increasing interest among Gartner clients around the topic of White-Box and disaggregated switching. Today, nearly all mainstream organizations use traditional (integrated) switches from vendors like Cisco, HP,...

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Comments: 3

Facebook's New Data Center Network Design

by Andrew Lerner  |  November 17, 2014

For all the talk about the hyper scale data centers, there hasn’t actually been a ton of  detailed information about how they do the network stuff they do. This week,...

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White-Box Switching Market Share

by Andrew Lerner  |  September 2, 2014

In August, we published market share research for Data Center Ethernet Switching, which covers 1G/10G/40G/100G port shipments/revenue. While it is no surprise that Cisco is on top with over 50%...

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Coolness in Networking

by Andrew Lerner  |  April 23, 2014

Gartner’s Cool Vendors in Enterprise Communications published today in which Tim Zimmerman, Joe Skorupa and myself profile four “cool” vendors including Cumulus Networks, Nuage Networks, Pica8 and Plexxi and also revisit...

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Comments: 10

Network Disaggregation is Cool

by Andrew Lerner  |  April 17, 2014

There has been a lot of talk lately around white-box switching and the associated concept of network switching "disaggregation". While understood by cloud service providers and/or operators of really large networks, the...

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Comments: 14

Finally an Interesting Week in Networking

by Andrew Lerner  |  January 31, 2014

Prior to this week, the most influential company in the networking market so far in 2014 was arguably Elliott Management.  Elliott – an activist investor –has been doing activist investor-type...

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