GigOm reports that Cisco is buying the key engineering staff and entire intellectual property of Procket Networks in a cash deal worth $89 million.
Cisco recently unveiled its own $500,000 core terabit router, the Huge Fucking Router (HFR). LightReading speculates it may be worth $89 million to Cisco simply to take out a potential competitor. The initial version of Cisco’s Carrier Routing System-1 (CRS-1) lacks several key features such as full support for Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS).
University of Oregon has deployed the PRO/8000 series from Procket Networks as a border router between the University of Oregon campus network and the Oregon Internet Exchange (Oregon-IX); the Oregon Gigapop (Internet 2 Connectivity Provider to Abilene); the Network for Education and Research in Oregon (NERO), for higher education and K-12 schools; and state offices in Oregon.
The University of Oregon s deployment includes Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), Multicast Border Gateway Protocol (MBGP), Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP), Protocol Independent Multicast-Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) and access control lists in an architecture supporting unicast and multicast, peering with multiple service providers.
In addition to deploying Procket technology, the University of Oregon has become one of the charter members of the Procket Research and Education Alliance, a program to foster development and deployment of next-generation Internet infrastructure technology and applications.
In related metro networking news:
The Texas Department of Transportation will offer free wireless Internet access at the state’s 84 rest areas and 12 travel information centers while the state of Maryland is launching “hot spots” at two of its welcome centers on Interstate 95 so motorists can access the Internet wirelessly.
When Portland’s Multnomah County voted more than two to one against a public utility district last fall, eight precincts in southeast Portland stood out with some 57% of voters favoring public power. Those districts would form the boundary for a proposed Willamette Electric People’s Utility District.
In related news, governments and jurisdictions around the globe have been adopting Linux and open source technologies, sometimes with mixed results.
- Calgary, Alberta, announced it was migrating much of its infrastructure to Linux, though it admitted that its desktops would remain on Microsoft Windows.
- City officials in Munich, Germany have approved a plan to change their 14,000 computers from Microsoft software to open-source Linux programs – a process that will take until 2009.
- Bergen, Norway plans to move 100 schools and 32,000 users away from its proprietary Unix and Microsoft Windows applications platform to Linux by the end of this year. The decided on a two-phased implementation of Novell Inc.’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8, which will impact some 50,000 users of the city’s administrative and educational networks.
- Bangalore, India and IBM have set up a Linux centre of competency with two additional branches in New Delhi and Mumbai
Governments of Britain, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, China, South Africa and Russia are also all exploring open-source alternatives to Microsoft, while federal agencies in Germany, France and China are all already using or considering open-source desktops and productivity suites.
