12 Hot Networking Products For The Summer

New Networking You Need To See

The summer is here and so is a plethora of new networking products from switches and access points, to software and meeting room collaboration solutions.

Networking vendors such as Aruba Networks, Juniper Networks and Cambium Networks are continuing to pour on more software and new operating systems to their network hardware, while Polycom's innovation engine keeps advancing around workplace collaboration. Extreme Networks was able to launch a new line of switches ahead of its planned acquisitions of Brocade Communications data center business and Avaya's networking business.

As the networking market begins to heat up, CRN takes a look at 12 new products looking to make waves in 2017.

Cambium Networks Wi-Fi Offerings

Cambium Networks launched a slew of new networking offerings including new 802.11ac Wave 2 access points, software features and management capabilities for its cnPilot product line.

New 802.11ac indoor APs include the E410 2x2 dual band, and the E600 4x4 dual band with Bluetooth, USB and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. The Rolling Meadows, Ill-based wireless specialist also unveiled outdoor E501S enterprise APs with a built-in sector antenna; as well as the R190 802.11n indoor small-business single band router.

Cambium's new software includes the cnMaestro Managed Service Provider, which simplifies configuration, upgrades and monitoring processes to scale enterprise managed services business for MSPs. The company's new autoPilot software enables the access point to function as a controller for cnPilot networks of up to 32 APs.

Ruckus AP Combines With ICX Switch

Before Broadcom's planned acquisition of Brocade for $5.9 billion later this year, Ruckus Wireless has combined its wireless products with Brocade's wired switching portfolio. Ruckus unveiled a multi-Gigabit offering, the ICX 7150 Z-Series switch and the Ruckus R720 AP, aimed at delivering more efficient performance while providing flexible scalability and simplified management.

The ICX 7150 Z switch is a 48-port switch that includes 16 2.5-GbE ports and32 10/100/1000 ports. The 7150-Z includes dual hot-swappable power supplies and fans, while it is also stackable with other switches in the ICX 7150 family. The Ruckus R720 is a dual-band 802.11ac Wave 2 AP with one 10/100/1000 and one 2.5-GbE port.

Brocade has agreed to sell its network-edge portfolio, which includes the Ruckus Wireless and ICX Switch product families, for $800 million to Arris International.

Aruba's New Core Switch And New OS

Aruba Networks revealed its first core switch, aimed at stealing market share from Cisco's popular Catalyst line of network switches. The Aruba 8400 Core Switch Series is powered by the company's new ArubaOS-CX operating system.

The 8400 switches are fully programmable with a built-in Python interpreter and REST-based APIs for every function. Aruba said the offering enables easy integration and ongoing flexibility with infrastructure and applications, including the Aruba Mobile First Platform for end-to-end network monitoring, detection, troubleshooting, and closed-loop remediation of network performance or security-related issues.

Juniper Networks Boosts SDSN, Adds NSX And Azure Interoperability

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based networking vendor has enhanced its Software-Defined Secure Networks (SDSN) platform aimed at delivering security across multivendor environments as well as public and private clouds.

Juniper Networks added features to its Junos Space Security Director Policy Enforcer that automates security policy enforcement across the network to prevent threats across firewalls, Juniper switches and now third-party switches. The policy enforcer is also now compatible with VMware NSX. In addition, Juniper's virtualized firewall, the vSRX, now has the ability to integrate with Microsoft Azure.

Juniper has also added its cloud-based malware prevention service to SDSN, enabling advanced detection to rapidly find and catch security issues, including ransomware threats such as WannaCry.

Polycom Pano

Polycom recently introduced its newest collaboration offering, Polycom Pano, touting it as the easiest way to share content at work. Customers can connect Pano to any display to enable wireless content sharing from PCs, Macs, tablets, smartphones and even live video. Pano includes built-in security safeguards that limit sharing to the monitor and protects content once a meeting has finished.

Pano has an expanded set of capabilities for a touch monitor, including interactive whiteboarding features. The offering works with any existing video equipment, making it an easy add-on to existing conference room technology.

ExtremeSwitching New Series

Extreme Networks' new ExtremeSwitching X870 Series offers high-density 100-Gb fixed form switches suited for top-of-tack and leaf-spine architectures. The X870 series port licensing option allows customers to pay as they grow.

The X870-32c spine switch supports up to 32 100-Gb ports, 64 50-Gb ports, 128 25-Gb ports, 32 40-Gb ports or 128 10-Gb ports.

The X870-96x-8c high density leaf switch supports 96 10-Gb ports and has eight additional QSFP28 ports to support 10-Gb, 25-Gb, 40-Gb, 50-Gb or 100-Gb data rates.

Plexxi Switch 3eq

The Nashua, N.H.-based hyper-converged networking startup launched its first switch in its new Switch 3 Entry Series family offering support for 25-GbE, 50-GbE and 100-GbE speeds.

The Plexxi Switch 3eq is based on Broadcom's Tomahawk chipset and provides a solid foundation for high-performance storage and compute fabrics as well as hyper-converged infrastructures, according to the company.

Aerohive Connect Spans Portfolio

Aerohive Networks has expanded its Connect solution into every access point and switch in Aerohive's portfolio. Aerohive Connect offers enterprise connectivity, cloud management and interactive forum-based support. The offering leverages Milpitas, Calif.-based Aerohive's distributed Wi-Fi architecture and cloud networking to increase speed, scale and resiliency.

Versa Networks Virtualizes Entire Branch And WAN

Software-defined WAN startup Versa Networks has significantly enhanced the capabilities of its Versa Cloud IP Platform by adding new security functions, local branch networking and the ability to host third-party virtual network functions (VNFs) to provide custome's a smooth transition to SD-WAN.

The enhanced platform now enables enterprises and service providers to virtualize and software-define the entire branch and WAN to further reduce complexity and increase IT agility, according to the vendor. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup added multivector malware security and embedded LTE into the platform for more resilient deployments and to reduce clutter.

Array Networks AVX Series

The Milpitas, Calif.-based networking company launched its AVX Series Network Functions Platform. The new line is a purpose-built, virtualized hardware system designed for multitenancy that hosts multiple Array and third-party virtual application delivery, networking and security functions. The offering supports variable size virtual machines and a pay-as-you-go licensing model.

"With our new AVX Series, network engineers can kickstart NFV projects without the need to be experts in servers, hypervisors and SR-IOV technologies," said James Kwon, Array's senior director of product management, in a statement.

Prysm Go

Cloud-based collaboration specialist Prysm launched its new Prysm Go product looking to turn any meeting room into a multi-purpose collaboration room. The offerings includes offers a digital whiteboard, wired and wireless screen sharing, no sign-in required and integration with other videoconferencing and unified communications tools from Cisco, Polycom and Microsoft.

Prysm Go is available in two versions. The all-in-one version features the Prysm application appliance, an 85-inch 4K LCD display, and an option to sign up for a free trial of the Prysm Application Suite for interactive meetings. The second version uses Prysm Go along with existing hardware, which includes the Prysm application appliance and the free trial of the Prysm Application Suite.

Gigamon's GigaVUE-HC3 Appliance

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Gigamon launched GigaVUE-HC3, touting it as the first high-performance appliance to enable pervasive visibility and security intelligence at scale in 10-Gb, 40-Gb and 100-Gb networks. The new offering extends the visibility platform and GigaSmart technologies with higher compute and throughput performance to effectively manage, secure and analyze high volumes of data in transit across networks.

The GigaVUE-HC3 provides capacity of 800-Gbps of GigaSmart traffic intelligence per node, scaling to 25-Tbps in clustered configuration, according to Gigamon, as well as up to 3.2-Tbps of processing per node that scales to over 100-Tbps per cluster.

Cisco Software EAs

Although not specifically a product, Cisco's new enterprisewide software licensing agreements are tied directly to the company's collaboration, security and networking infrastructure portfolios.

The San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant said the new Enterprise Agreement (EA) is either a three- or five-year licensing contract and partners will have the potential to bring in more revenue, with a lower up-front investment in software, hardware and services with the new EAs.

"You can imagine a world where we have different contract terms across infrastructure, collaboration and security and the complexity that would cause – this model brings everything together in a simplified buying model with standardization within the contract terms," said Allen Boone, director of strategy and planning at Cisco's offer monetization office. "So there's one place where you can buy the enterprise infrastructure, collaboration, security suite that are all available on top of a single agreement that spans the entire portfolio."