Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman is featured in SiliconAngle’s Live NewsDesk Show this morning to talk about the latest in Internet switches and software-defined networking. There have been a few physical switch announcements that happened this week from Arista, HP, and Brocade. SDN and Software are currently drumming up quite a buzz on the networking scene!

To start, Stu’s really excited about Arista’s refreshed products to improve the density and pricing of the switch. For the last couple of years, everybody has been talking about a leap from 10Gb to 40Gb as the next step for internet switches, but Arista actually exceeds expectation and now offers 10Gg, 40Gb, and even a whopping 100Gb optics.

“The density and the price of these new products are really impressive. If you look at the price point, its $550 for 10Gb, $2200 for 40Gb, and $10,000 for 100Gb. For comparison, most of the 100Gb ports that we’ve seen over the last year is close to over $100,000 so Arista’s price point is really setting the bar of the entire industry.

“Its order magnitude is one-tenth of the price of what they had. In a quarter of a rack, you can get over a thousand 10Gb ports and… you’re getting a dozen of hundred gigabyte ports. Arista is really trying to build that foundation for the new SDN cloud environments and really go straight after Cisco’s core base.”

Moving on, HP still reigns number two in the data center market, even as quite as they’ve been in the recent weeks. However, this week, the company finally made some noise as they unleashed a broad announcement in switches with HP FlexFabric 5900.

“HP FlexFabric 5900 switch has both physical and virtual model. Just like Cisco has the 1000V, NEC and IBM also has virtual switches, and now HP. They have also added aggregation and core switches, and lots of 40Gb internet support across the portfolio. It makes HP a serious contender for some of that datacenter switching. “

Brocade also announced some hardware and SDN updates, though they are lagging a bit when you consider the industry’s other developments this week.

“Their pitch was to unify the physical and virtual environment. Brocade made a big splash with Vyatta acquisition last year. They have a new virtual appliance delivery switch, and they’ve also added 40Gb to their router solutions. Lots of upgrades across the board for Brocade.”

Check out the video below for Stu’s entire segment.