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Big Switch joins the HPE Open Networking ecosystem

Announcement posted by Big Switch Networks 09 Aug 2017

SDN-based Big Cloud Fabric and Big Monitoring Fabric data centre networking solutions now available on HPE Altoline switch products

Melbourne, Australia – August 9, 2017 – Big Switch Networks, The Next-Generation Data Centre Networking Company, today announced it has joined the HPE Open Networking ecosystem.

As Big Switch Networks continues to see a global increase in interest and adoption of open networking solutions from web-scale organisations, service providers, enterprise data centres and government agencies, this expands the reach of its software offerings for the open networking community. With the offering, customers will gain the advantage of dramatically simplified network management and better visibility of networking flows and Big Switch’s highly differentiated networking software.
 
“We continue to see customers vote for choice, as witnessed by the rise in demand for open networking solutions. We’re pleased to extend our open networking ecosystem with HPE,” said Susheel Chitre, VP of Business Development, Big Switch Networks. “HPE and Big Switch will provide customers with the best solutions for their specific needs, including SDN-based data centre fabric optimised for VMware workloads, scalable, high performance OpenStack NFV deployments, next-generation out-of-band network monitoring, and a scalable SDN service-chaining fabric for DMZ security.”
 
HPE will resell Big Monitoring Fabric™ (Big Mon) and Big Cloud Fabric™ (BCF) with its Altoline Open Networking switching solutions. Big Switch products will provide HPE Altoline data centre networking offering with automated and easy-to-deploy network switching, monitoring and security solutions. Additionally, this expands the appeal of the Altoline solutions to new customers in the network visibility and security markets via Big Switch’s network packet broker (NPB) products. Big Switch’s fabric-based solutions offer a better alternative to the status quo of a manual, switch-by-switch approach to networking.
 
“With the addition of Big Switch to our portfolio, customers gain access to easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy solutions for network management, visibility and security,” said Philippe Michelet, Senior Director of Product Line Management, Data Center Networking, HPE. “This cooperation shows our commitment to provide our customers with innovative open networking solutions that address their network agility and scalability challenges.”
 
Big Monitoring Fabric
Big Monitoring Fabric is an network packet broker (NPB) that leverages software-defined networking (SDN) principles, Altoline Open Networking switches and a high-performance x86-based DPDK service node to provide feature-rich, scale-out data centre monitoring at up to 50 per cent lower cost than traditional NPBs. By combining the functions of traditional NPBs with the intelligence, agility and flexibility of an SDN controller-based architecture, Big Mon provides customers with pervasive visibility in all physical and virtual (VM, container, cloud) workloads for security, performance management and compliance tools.
 
Customer use cases for Big Monitoring Fabric include: monitor every rack, monitor every location, monitor mobile/LTE networks and DMZ/Extranet Inline security. With Big Mon, end-users can experience the benefits of single pane of glass management, zero-touch scale-out, and built-in analytics to simplify operations and troubleshooting. Big Mon also supports multi-tenancy for different IT teams, such as NetOps, DevOps, and SecOps to share the visibility and security fabric, with overlapping, yet segmented access to network flows and tools.
 
Big Monitoring Fabric supports 1G, 10G, 40G and 100G for the most demanding and high volume network monitoring and security environments.
 
Benefits of Big Mon include:
Deploy faster

  • Auto-discovery and configuration of Big Mon nodes

  • Tools can receive traffic from anywhere in the network, regardless of physical location

  • Delivery policies are programmed from a single interface

Operate faster

  • Real time visibility and analytics for quick troubleshooting

  • REST APIs for tool and workflow integration and automation (event triggered monitoring, alerts, and tool interactions)

  • Attack mitigation at terabit scale — automated or user-driven

Scale and innovate faster

  • Zero-touch scale out

  • Changes to traffic delivery policies can be made without any physical reconfiguration of the visibility architecture

  • Add inline tools without impacting network operation

  • Reprogram policies in real time based on newly discovered threats

Centralised tooling for significant L4-10 appliance license savings

  • Intelligent traffic routing allows for intelligent flows, reduced appliance capacity requirements, lower license fees

  • Immediate ROI with tool consolidation

Big Cloud Fabric
Big Cloud Fabric incorporates design principles that hyperscale organisations like Google and Facebook pioneered, implementing a logical, scale-out switch architecture that leverages intent-based principles to deliver agile and flexible data centre switching based on SDN controls, HPE Altoline Open Networking switches and fabric design. By deploying a disaggregated third party software/industry-standard switch hardware model, end-users can experience up to 50 per cent TCO savings over legacy networks.
 
BCF delivers zero-touch operations, network automation and deep visibility for software-defined data centres (SDDC) and cloud-native applications. BCF supports both physical and virtual (multi-hypervisor) workloads and choice of orchestration software. It provides L2 switching, L3 routing, and L4-7 service insertion and chaining while ensuring high bisectional bandwidth. The scalable fabric is fully resilient with no single point of failure and supports headless mode operations.
 
The solution has built-in integration for VMware Software-Defined Data Centers (SDDC), OpenStack clouds and container environments. BCF can be deployed in existing data centres as a new pod without disruption to traditional networks.

Big Cloud Fabric benefits:

  • Simplicity: zero-touch fabric and single-point of management

  • Agility: network automation with vSphere and OpenStack integration, REST APIs for optional NetOps/DevOps automation

  • Visibility and troubleshooting: built-in analytics with historical replay, leaf-spine-leaf fabric tracing for rapid troubleshooting, end-point visibility at VM-level

  • Economics: dramatic reduction in OpEx and CapEx

  • Innovation velocity: faster time to service enablement as well as rapid (hitless) software upgrade enables rapid consumption of new features

Big Cloud Fabric supports 10G and 40G for the most demanding and high volume network monitoring and security environments.
 
Support for Altoline Open Networking hardware
The HPE Altoline is a family of disaggregated networking switches designed to accelerate the adoption of open networking in cloud data centres. Altoline offerings span the full spectrum of networking speeds – from 10, 100, or 1000BASE-T to 10GbE, 25GbE, 40GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE. Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric will support the following Altoline switches at general availability:

  • Altoline 6960: 25/100GbE spine/leaf top-of-rack (ToR) switch – Tomahawk, 32 x 100GbE QSFP28 ports supporting 10GbE, 25GbE, 40GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE

    • The Altoline 6960 switch series provides an open network platform for high-performance spine/leaf deployments. Dig deeper into the hardware to see how you will benefit from:

      • High performance: ToR 1U 100GbE switch

      • High scalability: 32 x 25GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE QSFP28 ports (alternatively, 128 x 10GbE or 25GbE ports)

      • Flexibility: Deploying as 40GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE spine, or ToR with 10GbE or 25GbE to servers and 40GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE uplinks

      • Easy network virtualisation and cloud: VXLAN support, especially with Trident ii+ ASIC

      • Higher reliability: Redundant fans and power supplies for data centre deployment

  • Altoline 6941: 10/40GbE spine/leaf ToR switch—Trident II+, 32 x 40GbE ports supporting up to 128 10GbE ports using breakout cables

  • Altoline 6921: 10GbE leaf ToR switch— Trident II+, 48 x 10GbE SFP+ ports+6 x 40GbE QSFP+ uplink ports

Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric and Big Monitoring Fabric are generally available to purchase today from HPE.
 
Supporting materials

About Big Switch Networks
Big Switch Networks is the Next-Generation Data Centre Networking Company. We disrupt the status quo of networking by designing intelligent, automated and flexible networks for our customers around the world.  We do so by leveraging the principles of software-defined networking (SDN), coupled with a choice of industry-standard hardware. Big Switch Networks has two solutions: Big Monitoring Fabric, a Next-Generation Network Packet Broker, which enables pervasive security and monitoring of data centre and cloud traffic for inline or out-of-band deployments and Big Cloud Fabric, the industry's first Next-Generation switching fabric that allows for choice of switching hardware for OpenStack, VMware, Container and Big Data use cases. Big Switch Networks is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with offices located in Tokyo, Melbourne, London and Istanbul. For additional information, email info@bigswitch.com, follow @bigswitch, or visit www.bigswitch.com.
 
Big Switch Networks, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Monitoring Fabric, BigSecure, Big Chain, Switch Light OS, and Switch Light VX are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.
 
Media contacts
Espresso Communications for Big Switch Networks
Amy Rathbone/India Bednall
bigswitch@espressocomms.com.au
+61 2 8016 2200