3Com's new range includes virtualisation-ready switches

Taking yet another stab at the high-end enterprise networking market, 3Com has launched its "H3C Technologies" brand of equipment.

 3Com -- once considered an Ethernet pioneer and Cisco's fiercest competitor in the '90s -- dumped its high-end corporate networking portfolio in 2000. Then in 2003, 3Com made another attempt at entering the enterprise market with equipment it had developed with Chinese company Huawei. That equipment -- branded H3C -- was successful in China, but not elsewhere.

3Com has since maintained a networking portfolio focused on the small and medium-sized business (SMB) space, but the company is returning to a much more challenging enterprise market than it left behind. This year, Brocade has taken its newly acquired Foundry equipment and launched an end-to-end storage, data center and core portfolio and Hewlett-Packard beefed up its HP ProCurve line to serve the high-end data center. The acquisition of EDS means HP has a worldwide army on the streets angling for Cisco's business.

3Com and Huawei developed H3C enterprise equipment over the last five years. In 2008, 3Com bought out Huawei, and the line has now captured the largest enterprise accounts in China, growing to $US609 million in revenue in the five years since launch.

3Com is using the recession as its marketing angle. Saar Gillai, 3Com senior vice president of worldwide products and solutions, likened H3C to Toyota, which disrupted the automobile market during a recession with innovative technology and lower prices. 3Com is promising that its H3C technology can outpace Cisco at prices that are 20% lower.

"This is the perfect storm -- a combination of a downturn when people are asked to do more with less," Gillai said. "Because of the downturn, people are considering other vendors. Networking is not that complicated, so why do I have to be locked in?"

Virtualisation-ready H3C switches and management platform target Cisco

3Com's H3C has a technology story worth telling. The North American portfolio will include a new high-end data center switch -- the S12500 -- that will rival the Cisco Nexus 7000. The S12500 offers 6.6 terabits of throughput and scales to either 864 gigabit ports or 512 10 gigabit ports. Like the Nexus 7000, the S12500 also enables a unified fabric of converged Fibre Channel and Ethernet. H3C also promises that the switch will use 50% less power than the Nexus 7000.

Then there is the new H3C S5800G/XG Flex-Chassis, a modular switch that can work in the core or the access layer of a medium-sized enterprise network or can sit at the top of rack in the data center. The switch can support up to 24 ports of 10 gigabits per unit or up to 80 ports of 1 gigabit per unit, supporting Power over Ethernet (PoE) for energy efficiency. What's more, the S5800 offers a virtual fabric so that switches deployed throughout a network can be managed as one.

"You can deploy the 10 gigabit version in three different buildings and manage it as a single switch," said Dominic Wilde, 3Com senior director of global product line management.

The switches come with the H3C Intelligent Management Center (IMC), a virtualisation optimised platform that manages the entire enterprise network in a multi-vendor environment. The H3C management platform is specifically designed to manage virtual platforms as quickly as they are created and dismantled.

"Cisco's Achilles' heel is their management story," Wilde said. "They have 76 different products that manage different products [in the network]."

H3C rounds out what will be a triumvirate of 3Com brands, including the self-named SMB focused networking equipment and the TippingPoint line of security products.

3Com partners need not apply?

3Com has long sold itself as the cheaper alternative to Cisco, and the company has not been able to maintain a huge market share even in the midmarket. That said, Cisco has worked hard to capture the Chinese market and has largely lost out to H3C in the past five years.

"I think they have good timing here," said Forrester analyst Chris Silva. "What they're going to try to be is a cost leader … they're appealing to budget sensitivities. Right now, 38% of companies are still investing in the network."

Silva warned that 3Com might want to reconsider focusing so hard on Cisco when HP -- which has been known as the cheaper alternative to Cisco -- poses such a competitive threat. On the other hand, he said, HP's recent headway in the enterprise market is ultimately a good sign for 3Com.

"More exposure for HP ProCurve is good for anybody in the market," Silva said, "because it sends the message: 'We can do what Cisco does at a lower cost.'"

The IMC management platform will be available in June, and the S12500 and S5800 will be available in July.

SearchNetworking ANZ will speak to 3Com on Thursday, May 14th, to learn about the products' Australian and New Zealand launch.