According to Forbes online, Cisco is announcing specifics on their Borderless Network vision with specifics on new switches.

These specifics come one week after Cisco’s overblown router announcement that was supposed to change the Internet forever.

We at SiliconAngle were reporting that Cisco was going to provide more ‘edge’ products as part of that big announcement which they never did. We stand by that original report and are sure those things will materialize eventually. With that in mind today’s announcement shows clearly that Cisco is pushing the value at the edge of the network both in mobile and other devices.

In today’s announcement Cisco revamped their Ethernet switches, added new services, and enhanced routers for it’s recently announced vision around Borderless Networks. Borderless Networks according to Cisco is designed to give users access to Cisco networks from any device.

Analysts are saying that HP might have the price advantage. Specifically the Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala pointed out that Cisco’s new product pricing will likely add up to about 10% more than equivalent products from HP. Additionally many are seeing the HP 3Com acquisition as a big force for Cisco to deal with. We covered the HP 3Com acquisition here on SiliconAngle with audio from Marius Haas.

Here are some specifics from Sam Daiz from Between the Lines CNet blog:

Those network services are:

* EnergyWise is a technology that allows users to extend power management to PCs and laptops, as well as Power over Ethernet devices. The company also released the SDK for EnergyWise so developer can implement support for it into their products.
* TrustSec allows users to deploy security policies across all access technologies, including wired, wireless and VPNs to further the authenticity of those access data remotely.
* Medianet is the technology that detects and optimizes video – as well as the allocation and prioritization of network resources – so that video can move between different types of devices.

My Angle on Cisco News: Move Fast

Cisco has to move fast to upgrade all their gear to make their performance and speed meet the expectations set up by their marketing hype machine. Two keys to Cisco’s announcement are security and video.

On the notion of borderless networks just last night at the Stanford VLAB event called "The Internet of Things"Dr. Peter G. Hartwell, Senior Researcher of HP Labs, was showing real examples of deployed sensors for their customers. At the VLab event the question about the ability to secure traffic on non-compute devices such as phones, surveillance networks, RFID readers, video conferencing systems, and anything else with an IP address was brought up. Trying to find out actual examples of customers having networks of things as described above.

I wanted to get a feel from folks deep in the trenches on this subject so I polled some folks on Twitter. After checking around on Twitter some key questions came up regarding borderless networks. Those questions were:

– the ability to address unmanageable devices such as VoIP phones or any other IP-based device that is unable to accept a client?
– can thy employ media access control (MAC) address authentication via RADIUS in combination with MAC address whitelisting and blacklisting, and leverages existing policy and profile stores (through LDAP interfaces)
– how does all this play out with multi-vendor network equipment players like HP and EMC

Again this notion of security and video are very important. More important are the "religious views" on the network architecture and will it be a Cisco only network or a multi-vendor network. No debate here that the edge is where the action is. Light Reading has a deep angle on this calling this QoS for video and more analysis.

The important questions are what elements of core networking and edge make up the solution. The debate will continue.