News

Big Switch Networks Enhances SDN for VMware, OpenStack Environments

• By David Ramel
• 08/20/2015

Big Switch Networks Inc. this week revealed enhancements for its software-defined networking (SDN) fabric in VMware and OpenStack environments, along with what it claims to be the first SDN elastic pricing model.

Big Cloud Fabric 3.0 facilitates new-age networking through an external SDN controller, advanced fabric design and open, bare-metal hardware, the company said, providing centralized management, network automation and lower costs.

The new edition features deeper integration for both VMware and OpenStack implementations, the company said. "Big Cloud Fabric 3.0 delivers the industry's first unified physical [plus] virtual SDN fabric for deploying resilient OpenStack clouds," it said. "Big Switch's Switch Light software is deployed on open networking switches (Switch Light OS) as well as on virtualized KVM servers (Switch Light VX). Its OpenStack Neutron plugin for L2/L3 networking provides resiliency necessary for production-grade OpenStack deployments."

Big Switch said its controller serves as a "single pane of glass" handling provisioning, troubleshooting, visibility and analytics tasks throughout physical and virtual network environments.

For VMware implementations, Big Switch said its updated fabric now integrates better with multiple VMware products, serving enterprises seeking to support the software-defined datacenter (SDDC). "This includes natively supporting advanced network automation and deep visibility for vSphere environments, now including vSphere 6; as well as support for VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO)," it said.

Another SDN fabric offering, Big Monitoring Fabric (formerly called Big Tap), was also updated. The company describes that product as a "next-generation network packet broker (NPB) that leverages SDN principles and Open Networking switches to provide scale-out datacenter monitoring at 30 percent of the cost of traditional NPBs." Updates to the monitoring fabric include "support for scale-out and low cost monitoring services such as de-duplication and packet modification with an x86 service node" along with support for high-density 100G switches with a lower-cost commodity approach.

Speaking of costs, the company also announced "elastic SDN pricing." This, Big Switch claimed, is an industry-first approach using a pay-per-use, consumption-based pricing model for hardware, software and support. The pricing model comes in small, medium and large configurations.