IBM launches dVS for vSphere 5.0

So this is an interesting announcement....I would not have guessed that IBM would market a distributed virtual switch for the vSphere 5.0 platform. When I think of networking gear IBM is not a brand that springs to mind. They did acquire BNT a little while back, but that was blade server focused. Expensive servers, storage, and mainframes yes....networking gear, no. According to the press release the IBM® System Networking Distributed Virtual Switch 5000V features:

• Manageability - Telnet, SSH, SNMP, TACACS+, RADIUS, Industry Standard CLI
• Advanced networking features - L2-L4 ACLs, Static and Dynamic port aggregation, PVLAN, QoS, EVB (IEEE 802.1Qbg)
• Network troubleshooting - SPAN, ERSPAN, sFlow, Syslog, VM network statistics

It is not surprisingly licensed on a per-socket basis. No word on price, but availability is February 23, 2012. Should be interesting to see some competition for the Cisco Nexus 1000v. You can read the full spec sheet here.