I recently had the chance to sit down with Rob Sherwood, CTO of Big Switch Networks to get his insight on whats hot with SDN for 2015. The interview can be seen on my youtube channel, OpenNetworking.TV here, and you can also view the transcript below:
[Art Fewell] Welcome to OpenNetworking TV, this is the CatchUp. I'm your host, Art Fewell. Today we are going to be catching up with another one of the founding fathers of the SDN movement, I hope that's a fitting description, Rob Sherwood of Big Switch Networks. Rob would you mind sharing a little of your background?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Few areas of the enterprise are as ripe for change as the wide area network. And there are plenty of technologies – from hybrid WAN services and software defined networking to better management tools -- lining up to push such a makeover closer to reality.
“There is about as much turmoil in the WAN arena as possible,” said Steve Taylor, senior research fellow with Webtorials.com.
You can get the sense of the tumult by taking a look at the vendor activity in all aspects of the WAN. A ton of startups including vendors such as CloudGenix, Glue Networks, Viptela and Velocloud are offering new WAN services and products. Established vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent and Riverbed are also scrambling to address WAN issues with new software and hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Linux container company Docker this week said it would acquire SDN start-up SocketPlane, a developer of a native networking stack for Docker software.Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. SocketPlane
SocketPlane was founded last fall by former Cisco, Red Hat, HP, OpenDaylight and Dell officials. The company is looking to bring enterprise-grade networking to the Docker ecosystem by developing software designed to address the performance, availability and scale requirements of networking in large, container-based cloud deployments.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In late 2014, Avi Networks came out of stealth mode with a product aimed at disrupting the application delivery controlled (ADC) market. Network World's Jon Gold did an excellent job covering the launch and the way Avi is attempting to differentiate itself, so I won't rehash what he has already covered.In the right environment, the value proposition of what Avi is doing should be obvious to anyone covering the software defined networking (SDN) or network functions virtualization (NFV) market. Avi brings a high level of agility to the ADC, enabling customers to deploy ADC resources anywhere they need to in the exact quantity required. The pay-as-you-grow model means organizations are no longer required to overpay for resources they won't need 90% of the time. Instead, they can provision for normal utilization and then purchase more capacity when the workloads require it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade has announced plans to acquire Connectem, a privately-held company whose virtualization software maps mobile workloads to clouds.Terms of the all-cash deal were not disclosed.+MORE ON NETWORK WORLD:Why SDN All-Stars are heading to Brocade+Connectem’s LTE virtual evolved packet core (vEPC) software for x86 servers is intended to eliminate the constraints of physical equipment while working with traditional node-based EPC architectures, Brocade says.Combined with Brocade’s other software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualized network functions (NFV) offerings – many from the acquisitions of Vyatta, Vistapointe, and the SteelApp virtual ADC product line from Riverbed -- Connectem’s software enables service providers and enterprises to connect mobile and IoT devices, data centers, and public and private clouds, Brocade says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In the movie, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Spock's older brother, Sybok, had telepathic abilities and he could feel people's pain by touching them. In the movie he would say, "share your pain with me and gain strength from sharing." Sybok was a deeply religious Vulcan and, in the movie, sought out to find "Sha Ka Ree," the Vulcan equivalent of Eden, where everything began. Nirvana, if you will.In the networking industry, software defined networks (SDN) are supposed to bring the networking equivalent of Sha Ka Ree. However, I don't need to be a Vulcan telepath to understand customers' pain when it comes to SDNs. Almost every network professional I talk to today has an interest in SDN. However, the majority of businesses feel that deploying a software defined network is too complicated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I recently had the great pleasure to sit down with community-elected OpenStack board member and Crowbar co-creator, Rob Hirschfeld. Rob shared awesome nuggets of wisdom on data center and cloud operations. You can view the video and the full transcript below:
Art Fewell: Welcome to Open Networking TV. This is the Catch Up, I’m your host Art Fewell. Today we will be catching up with the OpenStack guru, Rob Hirschfeld.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks CEO Charles Berger: "The change for Extreme vs. where we were prior to the [Enterasys] acquisition is pretty dramatic."
It’s been about 15 months since Extreme Networks completed the acquisition of Enterasys Networks, a move that bolstered not only Extreme’s financial heft, but widened its switching line and beefed up its wireless LAN capabilities. Extreme CEO Charles Berger gave IDG US Media Chief Content Officer John Gallant an update on the progress of integrating Enterasys’s technology and discussed how software-defined networking is reshaping the industry. He also discussed how Extreme’s work on in-venue wireless with NFL teams and others will benefit all customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
HP has joined the disaggregation party through two partnerships that will produce a branded white box switch capable of running multiple network operating systems.HP has expanded a relationship with Accton Technology to offer two new switches initially, and more later this year. The switches will be low-cost, software-independent white box hardware targeted at Web scale data centers supporting cloud, mobile, social media and big data workloads.Under a second arrangement, HP will offer Cumulus Networks’ Cumulus Linux network operating system on the Accton switches. Cumulus Linux runs on a variety of white box and branded switching hardware based on merchant silicon, and is intended to make the software side of networking hardware independent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
While the networking industry has gone crazy over software defined networks (SDNs), Brocade has been one of the few vendors that have continued to evolve their fabric portfolio. Customers looking to improve the agility and level of automation do not need to make the jump to an SDN – instead, an Ethernet fabric can be used to accomplish these goals and provide an excellent foundation for a future SDN deployment.Earlier this month, Brocade announced a new fabric switch, the VDX 6940. The new switch set the current high water mark in the industry with respect to port density for a fixed form factor switch. The 6940-36Q is a 1RU switch with 36x40 Gig-E connections or 144x10 Gig-E connections (assuming breakouts are used). The 6940-144S is a 2RU switch with 96x10-Gig-E ports and either 12x40 Gig-E or 4x100 Gig-E ports. Both switches have a massive amount of capacity, making them ideal for on-demand scaling of a fabric by adding capacity to a spine horizontally as the number of leaf switches increases.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the ways you can tell that software defined networking (SDN) has the power to change the vendor landscape is by the number of startups that have emerged. Over the past few years, we've seen startups pop up to address the evolution of the data center and the WAN. For this reason, I always tend to keep my eyes open for companies generating buzz in the marketplace in this area.
In my recent travels, I was made aware of another "stealth-mode" startup that's building a solution to address a new use case for SDNs. According to its website, Avni Networks addresses the "transformation of the Data Center to Virtual Clouds for the Applications Economy." From what I can tell, there seems to be some buzz around what this company is up to, which made me curious about learning more.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco now has 1,700 customers for its Nexus 9000 switch and over 300 for its APIC controller, the central element of its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) programmable networking and SDN strategy. This is up from 970 and 200+, respectively, in the company’s fiscal first quarter.The number of ACI/APIC customers compared to the number of Nexus 9000 customers – Nexus 9000 is the hardware underlay or foundation for ACI – might seem underwhelming at first blush: only 20% were ACI customers in Q1 and less than 20% in Q2. But APIC just started shipping August 1, Cisco says, while the Nexus 9000 has been shipping for almost a year.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco’s claim that its Nexus 9000 leaf switches have a VXLAN routing advantage over those based on Broadcom Trident II silicon is meeting some resistance. In announcing support for the BGP EVPN control plane for VXLAN on its Nexus 9000 switches, Cisco said its Nexus 9300 leaf switches, equipped with Cisco’s custom ALE ASIC, can route VXLAN overlay traffic, which the company touts as a benefit over Broadcom Trident II-based platforms from competitors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Last week, Brocade announced its intent to purchase the SteelApp product line from Riverbed for an undisclosed amount of cash. SteelApp is a virtual application delivery controller and competes most often with the likes of F5 and Citrix. Formerly known as Stingray, SteelApp came to Riverbed in the acquisition of UK-based Zeus, who pioneered the virtual ADC market. On paper, the acquisition made sense for Riverbed, as Zeus had solutions that optimized the performance of applications with a data center solution and Riverbed was a vendor that optimizes application performance over the wide area network.However, although the business unit had some early success when it was dropped into the Riverbed channel, it never really became a meaningful part of Riverbed's revenue stream. Now, after almost four years, SteelApp will become part of Brocade's business.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With the advent of SDN, there’s been a lot of speculation about the future of the network administrator.Some doomsayers predict the network admin will be obsolete as network virtualization becomes the responsibility of the server or systems admin already in charge of server virtualization. Or that as SDN applications take on more network intelligence in order to program what network resources they need, the application developers might take over the role of network admin.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Brocade this week said it will acquire Riverbed Technology's SteelApp product line in an all-cash asset transaction. Terms were not disclosed.
SteelApp is a virtual application delivery controller (ADC) for enterprise, cloud, and e-commerce applications. The SteelApp product line controls traffic to and from applications to improve application delivery.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cisco is adding a new control plane capability to its Nexus 9000 switches for customers not yet opting for or needing a full-blown application policy infrastructure.Cisco’s BGP Control Plane for VXLAN is designed to appeal to operators of multitenant clouds looking for familiar BGP routing protocol features with which to scale their networks and make them more flexible for the demands of cloud networking. VXLAN, which scales VLAN segmentation to 16 million endpoints, does not specify a control plane and relies on a flood-and-learn mechanism for host and endpoint discovery, which can limit scalability, Cisco says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Dell is celebrating the first anniversary of its Open Networking initiative, an effort to offer customers a choice of operating systems and applications on standard, merchant silicon-based hardware.Dell was one of, if not the first major vendor to disaggregate switching – separating the interdependencies of hardware and software so customers, in this case, can run a variety of operating systems on Dell switches. Juniper followed suit with an Open Compute Platform-based switch that can run its Junos operating system, or another that’s ported to the OCP-based hardware.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In my first blog post I discussed the gap that exists between what consumers want and what the network can feasibly provide – what I referred to as the "agility gap." In just the four months since that post, we have seen a variety of new examples of the acceleration in technology advances for the consumer and end user, while the network chugs along trying to keep up.The most intriguing of these was Sony's unveiling of PlayStation Now at CES 2015, a cloud-based gaming subscription service that gives players unlimited streaming access to more than 100 games.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Big Switch Networks this week rolled out a new release of its cloud fabric software, which includes support for VMware vSphere environments and Dell switches, among other features.Big Cloud Fabric was released in the third quarter of 2014. It is an SDN fabric designed for bare metal switches.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here