News

Cisco, Extreme, Big Switch Form SDN Partnerships

• By David Ramel
• 09/10/2015

Software-defined networking (SDN) players continue to form partnerships while jockeying for position amid the sea-wave change to virtualized networking.

Making moves this week were Cisco Systems Inc., Extreme Networks Inc. and Big Switch Networks Inc.

Cisco made the most noise, as Verizon Communications Inc. announced Tuesday that it was the first major service provider to offer Cisco SDN technology, in the form of its Managed Software Defined Wide Area Network (Managed SD-WAN. The service leverages Cisco's Intelligent WAN, based on Cisco's counterpart offering to upstart SDN products, called Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC).

"With Verizon's new service, we are taking our IWAN solution to the next level," said Cisco exec Jeff Reed in a statement. "Cisco IWAN's open architecture enables Verizon to offer a flexible, highly secure and reliable service to its enterprise customers. With IWAN as the foundation and Verizon's expertise in network management, the solution will enable enterprises to improve the application experience for their employees and customers."

Meanwhile, Extreme Networks and Big Switch Networks formed their own respective partnerships.

ADARA Networks, a cloud computing and SDN company, announced it was collaborating with Extreme for interoperability between Extreme's SDN offerings and ADARA products including Dynamic Link State Protocol (DLSP)-enabled SKY Controller, CloudFabric Cloud Management Platform and Service Level Agreement Manager. ADARA said its DLSP provides services choreography and infrastructure orchestration products.

"Extreme Networks believes customers should be able to migrate their existing networks to SDN without expensive forklift upgrades," said exec Eric Broockman. "By integrating ADARA's unique and open SDN technologies with Extreme Networks' SDN Platform, we are offering a more robust SDN solution and OpenStack integration that demonstrate the full benefits of SDN."

Finally, U.K.-based Mayflex, which provides distributed converged IP solutions, is teaming up with Big Switch to offer that company's "hyper-scaling SDN products" to its portfolio. Mayflex described Big Switch as an original SDN pioneer, noted for its bare-metal SDN fabric.

"The company's Big Monitoring Fabric is an entry-level solution to a highly scalable, low-cost, feature-rich monitoring fabric for existing networks, and the flagship Big Cloud Fabric is the industry's most advanced bare-metal SDN switching fabric intended for new datacenter pods such as private cloud, Big Data and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)," Mayflex said.