Nortel continues the enterprise fight

Even though it filed Chapter 11 and is reportedly looking to sell off huge chunks of its business, Nortel is not giving up the enterprise fight.

The company this week will unveil its next generation large enterprise core/data center aggregation switch. The Virtual Service Platform 9000 is Nortel’s entry into the increasingly crowded core data center switch field, which has seen numerous announcements of late from Nortel’s competitors: Force10, Extreme, Juniper and even 3Com, which is re-entering the battle to provide a lower cost alternative to Cisco during these trying economic times.

Nortel says the VSP 9000 will go up against Cisco’s Nexus 7000, Force10’s ExaScale, Extreme’s BlackDiamond 8900, Brocade’s BigIron RX, Juniper’s EX8216, 3Com’s S12500 and any other switch approaching or exceeding 100Gbps per slot capacity and designed to aggregate hundreds of 10Gbps Ethernet ports.

Nortel’s challenges are significant, however. The company is restructuring under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from creditors so its future is uncertain. Also, the VSP 9000 won’t ship for another year, while most competitor offerings are already on the market.

“They’ll miss out on the early mover advantage, and their lack of a channel is a challenge,” says Zeus Kerravala, an analyst at the Yankee Group. “But this switch is way ahead of its time in handling virtual environments. Their product strategy is ahead of their corporate strategy.”

Kerravala says a key feature of the VSP 9000 is its support for Nortel’s Split Multi-Link Trunking technology, which is a link aggregation technique in which multiple physical links between two switches and another device – such as a server – are treated as a single high-speed pipe. Traffic loads are balanced across all available links.

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