Big Switch Networks unveiled its new flagship product — Big Cloud Fabric, a switching fabric designed for hyperscale data centers powered by SDN software and bare metal switch hardware.
The Big Cloud Fabric leverages the company’s Switch Light Operating System on physical leaf and spine bare metal switch hardware. It supports the latest Trident II silicon from Broadcom and is designed for 10G and 40G scale and resiliency, featuring headless mode high availability, zero-touch provisioning, L2/3 forwarding options, application-centric policy and service chaining. Management is available via OpenStack, Cloudstack, REST, CLI, or GUI.
Big Switch said fabric is designed for new pods in existing data centers supporting private cloud, big data, and VDI projects. Stated advantages include:
- a modern application/tenant centric configuration,
- a massive reduction in management consoles required for day-to-day management,
- integrated workflows for networking/security/audit teams (starting with OpenStack), and
- CapEx savings.
Big Cloud Fabric is available in two editions:
- P-Clos Edition: a physical leaf and spine fabric targeting a broad range of data center environments, including KVM/OVS, ESX, Hyper-V, Bare Metal, or a mix.
- Unified P+V Clos Edition: a physical + virtual fabric where leaf, spine and vSwitches are controlled by the Big Cloud Fabric Controller.
Big Cloud Fabric will ship later this quarter.
In addition to the introduction of Big Cloud Fabric, the company is releasing Big Tap 4.0 and expanding its partner ecosystem. Big Tap 4.0 supports a new use case – tapping distributed, remote data centers – to complement recent wins in scale-out, “tap every rack” designs. The release has an increasingly rich filtering feature set including deeper packet matching, applicable for tunneled packets such as those found in mobile protocols and VXLAN.
Big Switch also announced that it now has it first million dollar customer, and its largest production deployment now spans 16 data centers.
In April 2014, Dell announced a reseller agreement with Big Switch Networks targeting next-generation SDN fabric monitoring. Specifically, Dell will offer Big Switch Networks’ Switch Light OS on Dell Networking’s Ethernet switching portfolio, starting with the S4810 and S6000 series. Dell will also offer Big Switch Networks’ production-ready SDN controller applications starting with the Big Tap Monitoring – an innovative new SDN-based network monitoring solution unlocking hidden customer value and helping solve an age-old, costly networking challenge.
Dell said the deal extends its vision of a new, disaggregated model for networking hardware and software. The Big Switch Big Tap Monitoring provides an SDN-enabled fabric monitoring solution that empowers tapping network traffic everywhere and delivering it to security and other appliances to:
expand choice and capabilities for customers looking for best-of-breed Ethernet switch hardware, OS and SDN apps;
enable a range of next-generation SDN solutions; and
realize operational simplification for management, control and policies.
From January 2014:
