Okay, so this much-sought-after Wi-Fi router is only officially launched to the Singapore media today. But the truth is Linksys’ E4200 has been out in the market here for at least three weeks, during which time I bought myself a unit to hook up to my new fibre broadband connection.

The first thing that catches your eye is its ultra-sleek design. Hands down, this is the most gorgeous-looking home networking router out there, if there’s such a thing. 

I had previously been using D-Link’s excellent DIR-855, another top-end router that handled well the tasks at home, which included connecting two NAS boxes, five PCs, a couple of game consoles, a Logitech Squeezebox Touch and even a networked TV, to the Net.

My next router, I told myself, would have to have the standard high-end features – a gigabit WAN port, gigabit LAN ports and a powerful processor that handled everything thrown at it without freezing (yes, lesser routers do crash if you stack too many downloads on them).

But beyond just what the DIR-855 offered me, I wanted something that looked nice as well. There, I said it, I first looked at the E4200 because of its looks.

I wanted something that matched my Sony Playstation 3 and shiny TV console, because I was relocating the core of the home network from my study room to the living room, thanks to the fibre termination point being set up in the living room.

The minimalistic E4200 doesn’t have blinking lights at the front to distract you when you stream a movie to the TV. Only thing present at the top and front is the lit Cisco logo. The high-end router is also pretty small and svelte – more so than previous “UFO” Linksys routers.

Besides its looks, I soon got wowed by the E4200′s performance as well, after reading the respected SmallNetBuilder review site’s tests of the new router.

In particular, I was impressed by its WAN-to-LAN routing prowess (important for me if I wanted to have several high-speed connections to the Net via multiple devices) and its high-power 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi links, which meant steady wireless throughput in an apartment that has several blind spots, no thanks to heavy beams between rooms.

Once that was settled, my mind was made up. So, at the Funan mall a couple of weeks back, I ended up with a nifty new router after I bargained S$20 off the (rather expensive) S$279 suggested retail price. Right now, it is sitting prettily on the TV console, next to other audio-visual gear in the living room.

I’ll have to say I have not measured the router’s performance as SmallNetBuilder has, thus this is not a full Goondu Review. What I can say, based on casual observation, is that it is pretty robust. Even when I threw multiple downloads at it, while uploading to a friend via FTP, there was no slowdown when it comes to surfing the Net.

Another good thing is the 5GHz Wi-Fi,which proves to be speedy as long as you don’t try pushing the signals through too many walls (At higher frequencies, 5GHz signals are less able to penetrate walls than the regular 2.4GHz Wi-Fi that runs simultaneously on the E4200).

At least at line-of-sight distances of a handful of metres, the 5GHz network is great for fast transfers to my laptop. Even 1080p high-def movies stream via Samba without a lost frame, and I can scroll through movies instantaneously, without the usual lag associated with slower networks.

For this home setup, I had connected the router directly to a Nucleus Connect ONT (optical network terminal) and linked up to my M1 Broadband 100Mbps FTTH (fibre to the home) service. The other gear in the rest of the apartment are mainly hooked up via in-wall Cat5 cables and another couple of gigabit switches.

The reason why I am not using M1′s Huawei residential gateway, which I can rent for S$2 a month, is that it does not seem to have gigabit LAN ports (see Huawei site). If I run at 100Mbps on the WAN, I’d like some overhead within the LAN to deal with that kind of speed, so gigabit is the obvious choice – something you get standard on the Linksys E4200.

The only thing I don’t like about the E4200 is the manual Linksys interface, which offers mainly the basics and not even stuff like setting AES or TKIP encryption with the WPA2 Wi-Fi security. To do that, you have to have the router at its basic settings and control it (via Wi-Fi Protected Setup) with an Linksys PC application installed from the bundled CD.

And unlike with the D-Link DIR-855, Linksys also does not let me block out segments of incoming traffic by specifying their IP address ranges. This is something that is useful, say, if you just want to open up parts of your network to friends who are on SingTel or StarHub, and block out potential attacks from the rest of the world.

Instead of doing this on the E4200 router, the workaround for me is to set up the same rules on the firewalls of particular devices on the network that accept incoming connections from the Net.

What also irks me about Linksys UI is that it is rather sluggish to load, compared to, say, the D-Link DIR-855′s UI, which feels much zippier. One solution is, of course, to install third-party firmware such as Tomato or DD-WRT, which I understand, are currently being developed for the E4200.

But maybe that will be for another day. Right now, this good-looking and powerful router seems to be doing its job the way I like it to. It’s not such a cheap buy, for sure. But a Geek Buy for a home networking buff? Definitely.

Aruba Networks loves iPads, and is betting on the ubiquitous Apple device.

The wireless networking company’s new mobility architecture, Mobile Virtual Enterprise (MOVE), allows mobile devices like iPads to roam freely and connect within an enterprise space, and yet securely tracks them and manages their use.

Most importantly, Aruba Networks claims that their MOVE architecture uses less appliances (and hence rack space, energy and deployment), is simpler to manage, and will over a three year period save 70 percent of the total cost of ownership as compared to a rival solution, say, from Cisco’s Borderless mobility architecture.

At a press conference this week in Singapore, Aruba Networks — ranked number two in wireless switching behind networking king Cisco — quoted this exact example, and also launched MOVE in the Asia Pacific region together with a suite of new wireless products.

Albert Tay, general manager for South East Asia at Aruba Networks, is bullish about the marketplace for MOVE, and he gave two reasons.

One, there are lots of enterprises who are are looking at replacing their old Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g wireless standards to the faster 802.11n wireless standards, so it’s perfect to pitch the new architecture.

Two, it’s the damn iPad.

It is symbolic of the huge mobility trend — be it iPads, Android tablets or other smartphones — that is sweeping the world.

According to an IT predictions report by Gartner in late 2010, the combined install base of smartphones and browsing-capable phone hybrids will exceed 1.82 billion units in 2013. Past 2013, this will exceed the install base for PCs. What this means for mobility, and those who can tackle it well, is huge.

Aruba Networks tout MOVE as an architecture that will allow easy administration of mobility devices. Users coming onto a corporate network simply self-register their devices, a security certificate is pushed onto the device, and voila, the device is free to roam the network with the requisite security settings. (Of course it’s not exactly as simplistic as that, but that’s the gist).

Thus far, the fledgling architecture works only this seamlessly for iOS devices — i.e. iPhone or iPad, or iPad2. The Android roadmap will be released sometime later in the middle of the year, and will first support Android devices from HTC and Samsung.

When asked about Windows 7 devices, Aruba Networks said they are not sure about widespread market adoption of such devices yet, but will keep it in consideration for building this same seamless access.

Also in the roadmap is for the security certificates pushed to the mobile devices to connect automatically and talk to a public key infrastructure (PKI) — a security architecture that manages digital certificates — sometime later in the year.

A second key theme would be video.

Not surprising, given Cisco’s foray into this area in recent years: Cisco Telepresence for the big enterprises, Tandberg’s video conferencing (which Cisco acquired for US$3.4 billion in late 2009) for the mid-range and WebEx hosted solutions for the SMB space.

Both CEO John Chambers and CTO Padmasree Warrior mentioned video more than a couple of times during their keynotes yesterday and today.

“By 2013, 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic will be video,” said John in his keynote yesterday, reflecting Cisco’s bullishness about the potential for this market.

In fact video is one of five key critical pillars of Cisco’s strategy that he identified yesterday. The other four are:

• cloud and virtualization (no surprises here)
• collaboration (unified communications, but also a shoutout to Quad, their social media collaboration tool)
• core networking: routing, switching and services
• business and technology architectures. (i.e. a bigger slice of the pie than just products or solutions, so server players like HP, Dell watch out!)

To push the video message, they are offering 92 percent off WebEx – typically US$49 a month for one account, now US$5 a month — for partners at the event. The hope, of course, is technology evangelism and for the partners to use WebEx themselves.

And this makes perfect sense as Cisco announced a new channel offering today that gave partners a cut for reselling Cisco WebEx Meeting Center to SMBs.

Looks like Cisco is pushing the video message hard.

Speaking of SMBs, Cisco announced a couple of initiatives today aimed squarely at this space, including new products like the Cisco Unified 300 series and Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition 3000.

According to Rick Moran, vice president of marketing for Cisco’s Small Business technology Group, the SMB space has a global addressable market of US$8 billion, and more could be done to tackle this space.

To tackle the multi-billion dollar cloud market, Cisco will create new channel initiatives to help their partners sell the cloud jointly to customers.

At the Cisco Partners 2011 Summit in New Orleans this week, Cisco unveiled their upcoming cloud partner program, which will help partners decide what role they want to play and what business models to adopt in the Cisco cloud ecosystem.

Cisco’s Edison Peres, senior vice president of worldwide channels, said: “Cisco doesn’t want to be a cloud services provider. We want to enable our partners to become the [cloud services] providers.”

The Cisco cloud partner programme will create three tracks that their partners can go with: cloud builder, cloud provider or cloud services reseller.

The cloud builder track is for partners who design and implement cloud infrastructures, whether they be public or private clouds. Partners need to be certified competent in three aspects: infrastructure, management and professional services, all which require validation criteria from Cisco or other technology vendors in the ecosystem.

For example, under infrastructure there is a storage competency that requires the partner to have EMC, NetApp or Hitachi certification.

The cloud provider track is for partners who want to offer cloud services directly to the market and the cloud services reseller track is for those wanting to white-label the services of these cloud providers.

The advantage for partners to go through this certification process is that they get branding, reference architecture support, financing help, and market development funding.

Said Harry Zarek, President and CEO of Compugen, a Canadian IT services company, who was at the event as a reference partner during the press conference: “The cloud partner program is an opportunity to have a safe playground to build out services.”

Tech analyst Venu Reddy, who is vice president of SMB-focused research firm AMI, was less bullish: “Of course it is a smart move by Cisco. Cloud is something they have to do, and it helps them segment the ecosystem and sell cloud.”

He added: “But are they building anything new or moving ahead in the game? Not necessarily.”

The Cisco cloud partner program is slated to be launched globally in Q4 2011. Research firm IDC estimates the cloud computing market is currently US$1.6 billion, but this will swiftly grow in the years ahead.

Improving partners’ ability to sell

In addition to the unveiling of the cloud partner program at the event, Cisco is also launching a new consulting service targeted at partners: Cisco’s collaborative professional service. This consulting service aims to help partners improve their professional services capabilities to sell IT architectures.

A library of mainly pre-sales services, the collaborative professional service currently contains 30 business services in its portfolio.

These 30 business services span all major Cisco technologies like collaboration and data centre virtualization, and include services like assessment, guidance and development, and providing best practices. Prices range from as low as US$2000 to US$8000 for a one-off assessment, to as high as US$35,000 for a customized development specification.

“We definitely are not engaging in consulting with customers here,” said Cisco’s Karl Meulema, senior vice president for Cisco services, soothing fears that Cisco would cannibalize their partners’ competencies. “We just want to drive our partners through the [pre-sales] cycle faster.”

Cisco estimates that the total addressable services opportunity created by Cisco technologies is expected to be US$41 billion in 2011. As Cisco only addresses less than 20 per cent of this space, there are ample opportunities for partners to take up the slack.

According to Cisco, who ran a 40 pilot trial with several partners for this new service, they estimate that the time taken by partners to setup a practice was reduced by 30 to 40 percent when taught best practices. A 20 to 25 percent efficiency improvement was noted when partners asked for guidance or design help.

Said Compugen’s CEO Harry, who was one of these pilots, on why he thought the service made sense: “The reality of building your own intellectual property is that it takes a long time. Besides, the fees that Cisco charges are low enough or at market rate. It allows us to get to the market quickly, which is important.”

Cisco’s collaborative professional services will be available globally in Q3 2011, and will eventually expand to include cloud builder services (from the cloud partner program) later that year.

Networking company Juniper has released a new technology weapon — its Stratus QFabric switches and architecture — to conquer the core network switching space.

Released three days ago in late February 2011 in a worldwide launch, Juniper’s QFabric architecture is claimed by them to be a technologically superior way to implement network architectures, yielding both higher performance and significantly lower costs.

Lam Chee Keong, enterprise solutions manager for Asia Pacific at Juniper Networks explained that an ideal network architecture has a few key attributes like low latency, high reliability and scalability. These are typically implemented in a three tier networking framework, with core switches being surrounded by access switches and edge routers.

Juniper’s QFabric architecture aims to do away with this.

In the most extreme scenario he presented, a network architecture with 6000 server ports, he compared a Juniper QFabric architecture with a traditional Cisco architecture.

Juniper claims that with their architecture they can shrink hundreds of devices into a far smaller footprint — four chasis racks — consuming 90 percent less floor space and using 66 per cent less power.

On top of that, in their scenario, they project that their network speeds will be up to fifteen times faster and require far less management devices — one as compared to hundreds.

This is done by consolidating all the QFabric switches and allowing them to be plugged in directly to the QFabric interconnects. An analogy would be to think of the QFabric architecture as a series of blade servers, but instead of computing or storage, it is for networking solutions.

Attacking Cisco in the data centre space

With the worldwide network switching market’s year-on-year growth at 28.1 per cent for 2010, and a total valuation at US$21.1 billion according to research firm IDC, the future prospects look bright for Juniper.

Indeed, Juniper’s last quarterly earnings beat analysts’ expectations and showed a 26.4 per cent year-on-year increase in revenue. With it’s Stratus QFabric launch, Juniper is poised to do potentially even better, and will threaten longtime rival Cisco’s share in the core network switching space.

Juniper believes the QFabric solution will play well in the data center space as cloud computing and virtualization are two forces driving adoption. Both floor space and power consumption are big issues here, as well as the latency speed issues that the QFabric architecture solves.

Said Chee Keong, who estimates that data centres comprise 20 percent of the core network switching market: “The battleground is pitched at the data centre, because if it’s good enough here [to meet the stringent requirements], it’s good enough for other deployments.”

In Asia Pacific, Chee Keong is targeting two industries in particular: financial institutions and government. Banks require extremely low latency and robust solutions, and governments tend to house huge complex solutions which the QFabric can help more easily manage.

The QFabric QFX3500 switch ships this quarter and is undergoing customer trials, and the full QFabric architecture — like the interconnects and control plane — will be available in Q3 2011.

Juniper took hundreds of million of dollars and a million hours of R&D to develop the QFabric architecture, which started three years back in 2009 under project Stratus.

Updated (2nd march 2011):

Rival Cisco made light of Stratus QFabric launch.

At the Cisco Partner Summit 2011 in New Orleans, when asked if Cisco had any comments on this potential challenge by Juniper, CEO John Chambers said: “It’s a remarkably piecemeal solution given the number of years they’ve spent on it.”

He went on to elaborate that it’s far harder being an integrated player — like Cisco — that looks at architectures rather than just niche products.

Who cares how your home router looks like? That is what many broadband users would think until they see Cisco’s new US$179.99 Linksys E4200.

With a svelte frame hiding all the antenna and other networking goodies inside, it is surely one router you won’t mind placing next to your designer furniture in the living room. Linksys already has slim, UFO-shaped routers before this, but the E4200 in its new lineup just looks a lot more streamlined and sleek.

Under the hood, you can expect the works as well. The star here is the promised 450Mbps you can expect on your Wireless N connection, though your mileage will vary depending on how many pillars your apartment has and how many neighbours are fighting over the bandwidth with you, for example.

You can fight back with the E4200′s powerful 3×3 MIMO antennas that are now common on high-end Wireless N routers, though the good thing (at least for aesthetics) is that these are built into the Cisco router’s frame instead of jutting out awkwardly.

Like its previous high-end E series cousin, the E3000, the new router comes with the simultaneous dual-band feature that lets you run a 2.4GHz and a 5GHz network at the same time – one for video streaming and one for Net surfing.

Completing a stellar list of features are four gigabit-capable LAN ports – a must these days for streaming HD videos – and a USB port that you can run as an uPnP extension for streaming movies and songs to the rest of the home network.

I’ve got a Buffalo Nfiniti WZR-HP-G300NH serving as an access point for streaming and Net surfing in the living room and a D-Link DIR-855 in the bedroom now, but I won’t mind swapping one of them for a E4200, if only for its looks!

For the past year or so, many tech vendors — e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle — are jumping on and touting clouds as the next big thing. Now Cisco is taking up the banner charge and announcing their strategy and intent to attack this space.

At a telepresence media/analyst session held yesterday at Cisco offices in Asia and US, Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior and senior VP of the software group Doug Dennerline fielded questions on Cisco’s push into clouds.

Firstly, definitions. The over-hyped, fuzzy phrase “clouds” can mean wildly different things to different people, and I have gone off on rants before on what exactly do you mean when you talk about clouds. At least Cisco defined what exactly cloud computing means to them, and here’s their verbatim definition:

Cloud computing: IT resources and services that are abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided on-demand and at-scale in a multi-tenant environment.

Sigh. Basically it’s virtualization in the data centre. Not surprising, if you think about Cisco’s recent aggressive pushes into this space. They added one more line that today’s clouds are “associated with an off-premise, hosted model”, but the suggestion is that it need not be. Well, if you ask me, take away this part of the definition and “cloud” as a term becomes very weak. Anyway, I digress.

So where in this space is Cisco playing at? They defined four categories in clouds, and here’s a diagram from them.

Basically, Cisco sees opportunity in three of these four tiers that they defined: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (aka creating a platform for a third party to sell their SaaS on your platform) and the underlying IT infrastructure, which is Cisco’s core bread and butter. The infrastructure as a service is an area they are not looking at; they’ll rely on partners to roll this out.

My take on this? Cisco isn’t saying much in specifics. Besides broad strokes that they are going to play in this space, many questions were unanswered, like how are they competing with software vendors on unified communications (UC)/collaboration products (are they in the first place? to what extent?), how to tweak Cisco’s channel partners programme for cloud so that it doesn’t cannibalize their on-prem businesses, etc.

But it does signal Cisco’s ambition. Cisco believes that enterprise customers will eventually outsource parts of their IT infrastructure to external clouds (reasons: economies of scale, commodity services, etc.), yet keep much infrastucture internally for security and control reasons. And being a network vendor that girds the infrastructure for many enterprises, they believe they are best placed to cobble up and federate external clouds with internal virtualized network solutions. Why let other vendors eat up so much of the IT infrastructure and services stack when you can do this?

Therein lies the danger. Simon Piff, program director of IDC for AP storage research, whom I met at the event, said: “Cisco will potentially alienate more partners with this.” He mentioned that they have already alienated many long time partners like HP, IBM and Dell by moving into the data centre with blades and commodity servers, and more will likely come with their push upwards into clouds and SaaS. Cisco’s ambition is definitely something the rest of the big technology players won’t discount and will watch out for.

But with big ambition comes big prizes as top dog, and Cisco has deep pockets. “You never know, maybe Cisco will emerge as the next IBM”, Simon said.