If you remember the old Austin Powers movies, Mini-Me was a full replica of Dr. Evil in every way. Just as evil, just as cunning, and just as powerful. Today, Riverbed announced a “mini-me” version of its Stingray application delivery controller (ADC). Stingray came into Riverbed through the acquisition of Zeus so, in a way, Riverbed’s latest product is Mini-Zeus.

In the Austin Powers movies, Mini-Me really didn’t seem to have much of a purpose other than to laugh evilly and scream once in a while. That certainly isn’t the case with the mini-ADC, or Stingray Services Controller, as the product opens up new markets for ADCs.

Historically, hardware-based ADCs have been deployed on a “per-application” basis. Rolling out a new application? Buy a new ADC. Migrating to a new hardware platform? Buy a new ADC. Customers would sometimes repurpose older hardware, but given how fast hardware evolves, this was more the exception than the norm. Lately, the hardware platforms have evolved to where a single ADC could be shared and support multiple applications, but this still doesn’t give a true one-to-one ratio of ADCs per application.

It feels like Cisco has been retooling the Cisco Developer Network (CDN) for the better part of a decade now. The program got life when the company acquired Metreos and Cisco put together a program called Cisco Technology Developer Program (CTDP) to build applications for the IP phone. There may be some of you chuckling at that notion, but many have thought (myself included) that there was indeed a market for such applications. Well, that never materialized, and CTDP evolved into what’s now known as CDN. The collaboration group at Cisco is focused not on IP phone apps but business apps with video, Jabber and VoIP integration.

However, CDN isn’t just related to collaboration – it’s supposed to be Cisco-wide. One of the biggest questions I’ve always had with CDN, and I’ve been a critic of it in the past, is what value the program has to the company outside of the collaboration space, particularly to the network. Cisco’s network infrastructure does have many building blocks for third parties, such as NBAR, PfR and flexible Netflow, but they haven’t been as widely utilized by third parties as I would have thought by now.

The data center is where all the action has been in networking over the past few years. We saw the introduction of the network fabric, the rise of software defined networks (SDN), a number of startups emerge, and we’ve seen a fair bit of M&A activity as well. Because of the rapid evolution, we’ve seen almost every major network vendor – Cisco, Brocade, Juniper, Extreme, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent and others – revamp the data center portfolio.

The one vendor that I thought was noticeably absent from the data center networking wars was HP. The company outlined its FlexFabric vision last year, but the only products it had to support the related architecture was the 10K, which is a campus switch, and the 12,500, which was great when H3C first released it, but was getting a bit old even when HP acquired H3C. Now, it’s clearly past its prime. The company has positioned the 12,500 as a data center switch and has beefed up the features set accordingly. The 12,500 now supports Ethernet Virtual Interface, SPB and other data center features. As of now, it’s limited to 10 Gig-E, but HP has stated that 40/100 Gig-E will be available later this year. Despite the added features, though, HP is the vendor I get the least amount of inquiry on regarding data center networking.

All eyes were on Silicon Valley and the Open Networking Summit this week. One of the big topics of conversation was Intel’s push into an already highly competitive software defined networking (SDN) space.

In theory, this move by Intel makes sense. SDNs transform the data center and create an opportunity for low-cost switch manufacturers to become a more important part of the data center. However, “theory” and “reality” are two different things, and I don’t believe a pure, white box switch really works in this market.

Over the past decade, chip companies such as Broadcom, Marvell, Mellanox and now Intel have tried to create software to complement the switch chips, in a bid to to sell the switch chips. Intel has WindRiver, Broadcom acquired LVL7, Marvell has Radian and even Mellanox uses open source software. Software plus chips equals success, right? Again, in theory it makes sense, but in practicality, this hasn’t worked.

Last week, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) held its annual Industry Analyst conference in Annapolis, Maryland. Unified Communications has historically been the primary focus for ALU’s go-to-market strategy, but the company has spent the last few years beefing up its OmniSwitch data networking portfolio as well. In fact, if you recall, ALU was the focal point of this Network World Article where the company beat out Cisco for a network project in its own home state.

Like every other network vendor, ALU has been trying to jump on the market opportunity created by the rise and complexity of server virtualization. I recently did some research that pointed out that a small amount of server virtualization saves both capex and opex. However, highly virtualized environments, meaning those that are more than 50% virtualized, have actually seen operational costs rise by as much as 20%. High amounts of server virtualization create unpredictable traffic flows that can wreak havoc on the network.