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HP Accuses Cisco of Diverting Data Center Standard
alphadogg writes "Networking rivals HP and Cisco have abandoned their common ground in data center switching, with HP accusing Cisco of diverting an IEEE standard and Cisco insisting that customers drove the change. At issue are two as-yet unratified standards in the IEEE for data center switching that were being defined in concert but are now diverging: IEEE 802.1Qbg and 802.1Qbh."
Yes, thats why MS forced OOXML as open document standard beside ODF. With two standards people do not know which to use and so stay on old one (MS closed). And, actually, OOXML is't even open.
Depends on how fancy you want it(and how much you feel like paying...)
Cisco has a fairly commanding lead in Real Serious WAN routers and such; but is just narrowly ahead of HP in share for the more basic managed switches that(unless you are absolutely made of money) probably provide most of the ports that your gear is hanging off. Particularly given the growth of both cost-sensitive-but-massive-in-scale commodity cluster/cloud provider stuff(which certainly doesn't cost 8.5 cents an hour by running on infiniband...) and the widespread adoption of VM clusters and iSCSI SANs among smaller outfits that wouldn't know what a fibre channel HBA looked like, being the "solid(unlike Dell switches, may no one have mercy on their souls); but comparatively inexpensive provider of bulk ethernet ports isn't exactly a bad place to be...
Not to worry. My sources tell me that the IEEE should be coming out with a new standard, needlessly crufty because of the need to be backwards compatible with both of its compatible predecessors, just a year or two after you've made a major investment in hardware that the vendor has no plans to support upgrading. Everything should be fully sorted out after you retire.