Cisco engineers plot new network switches

Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain and Luca Cafiero, three of Cisco's top engineers with a strong record in building some of the company's most important products, are in negotiations to create a new type of network switch for data centres, according to people with knowledge of the talks, The New York Times reports.

The product they are discussing, called Insiemi, would be designed to work in high-end computer centres that use “software-defined networking”.

Cisco takes software-defined networking very seriously, Light Reading writes.

The company might not be evangelising OpenFlow at every opportunity, but the larger SDN concept is very much going to be part of Cisco's long-term plans, officials have said.

What's more intriguing at the moment is the possibility of another spin-in, a start-up partly funded by Cisco with the expectation of being acquired by Cisco.

According to PC Advisor, Cisco has done this with two other internal start-ups, Andiamo, which made the company's SAN switches; and Nuova, which developed Cisco's Nexus data centre switches.

In all three cases, the same three Cisco engineers are involved in the start-up company formation, operation and product strategy and development.