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Juniper Networks this week will extend its SDN offerings with the release of its controller, roughly six months ahead of schedule.

HP this week refreshed its switch line and fortified its SDN portfolio with three new systems and a router, along with management and provisioning software extensions.

Jonathan Davidson took over Juniper campus and data center switching when the two previously separate business units were combined following the departure of founding engineer R.K. Anand. Davidson has a service provider routing background at Juniper and Cisco, which is no coincidence -- after five years in switching, Juniper has been unable to mirror the success it had in its first five years in service provider routing. But it did start from zero and surpassed at least six other incumbent vendors to attain the No. 3 position in the market. The company has more than 20,000 switching customers cultivated through organic development, Davidson notes. And as Juniper moves forward amid a forklift upgrade facing its EX core switch base and after an initial misfire on the QFabric data center switch, it's focusing on customer demands for simplification, agility and automation. Davidson discussed some recent and future developments in Juniper enterprise switching.

The third annual Open Networking Summit, an SDN conference organized by the Open Networking Foundation, convened this week just after ONF members Cisco and IBM unveiled a separate effort to define an open source SDN framework. Unlike the user-driven ONF, OpenDaylight is a vendor-driven project to cultivate a system of SDN applications, but it also raised suspicion of the group's real intent: Is it designed to stall SDN's momentum and the threat, real or perceived, it could pose to incumbent hardware vendors? ONF Executive Director Dan Pitt discussed some of these topics with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy at the Santa Clara, Calif., conference.

Cisco last week extended its data center product line to support Microsoft's Windows Server 2012 hypervisor and VM management features to more tightly align their respective data center and cloud architectures for joint customers.

Extreme Networks and Brocade this week separately announced products and strategies to tightly integrate IT resources in the enterprise campus.

Software-defined network, software-defined data center ... and now software-defined fabric.

Arista Networks this week unveiled software-defined networking (SDN) extensions to its data center switch operating system that tie the company's products into cloud orchestration and flow management systems.

Cisco this week reduced its workforce by about 500 people as the company realigns to face the advent of software-defined networking, cloud computing and its impact on routing and switching.

Any hopes Juniper EX8200 customers had that the core switch would grow to support next-generation 40/100G Ethernet, mobility, media-rich traffic, virtualization or cloud have been dashed.

Juniper Networks this week rolled out a scaled-down version of its core packet transport router targeted at space- and power-constrained environments and metro networks.