News

Oracle Adds Switches, Services to SDN Effort

• By David Ramel
• 03/02/2015

Oracle Corp. added to its software-defined networking (SDN) portfolio today with the unveiling of new Ethernet switches and virtual network services.

Targeting software-defined datacenters (SDDC) running in the cloud, the new, low-cost 10Gb/40Gb Ethernet switches can be used independently but are integrated with the Netra Modular System in the Oracle stack to "help collapse existing multi-tiered network topologies, simplifying IT infrastructure and reducing costs with fewer cables and simplified management," the company said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Part of the company's "converged infrastructure strategy," the Netra Modular System was announced last week, targeting the communications industry. It's described as the first platform to integrate traditional blade and rackmount architectures with networking and storage in support of network function virtualization (NFW), a new-age networking technology closely associated with the SDN and SDDC movements.

"Oracle Ethernet Switch ES2-72 and Oracle Ethernet Switch ES2-64 are designed to harness the full capabilities of Oracle engineered systems, servers and storage with extremely low latency and massive scalability for all Oracle applications including Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), as well as financial and high-performance computing (HPC) applications," the company said.

Oracle also said it was obviating the need for unscalable and inflexible purpose-built appliances to provide network services such as security, load balancing and routing. Instead, the company said, it's providing those functionalities on-demand through a single virtual instance with new Virtual Network Services added to its SDN technologies.

The services can be controlled from one central pane using the company's Oracle Fabric Manager console.

"Oracle SDN dynamically connects any virtual machine to any resource and allows for quick deployment of multi-tenant environments via a private virtual interconnect, which delivers up to 80 Gb/sec server-to-server bandwidth to radically accelerate application performance," the company said. "A single fabric connects up to 1,000 servers and 16,000 private virtual interconnects. With its new virtual network services capabilities, Oracle SDN now extends across the datacenter and is uniquely able to unify InfiniBand and Ethernet fabrics, allowing end-to-end provisioning of network infrastructure from a single management interface."

Along with the Netra Modular System, Oracle SDN also supports x86 architectures and the RISC-based SPARC architecture developed by Sun Microsystems Inc., which was subsequently acquired by Oracle.