Infotech Lead America: Pica8, a provider of open networking for software defined networks (SDN), has launched the Pica8 Open Data Center Framework to simplify the transformation into programmable and agile data center networks.
This framework will help cloud providers and web services companies to reduce the costs of application services provisioning.
Pica8’s Open Networking vision blends the conceptual benefits of the server and conventional networking worlds. The framework enables cloud and data center service providers to personalize and abstract the OS from the hardware and utilize commoditized switches in a similar rip-and-replace fashion to swapping out a white box server.
Pica8 technology leverages the Framework for more granular application flow management. Pica8 deployments in various architectures provide distributed intelligence along with the orchestration needed to provision services to meet specific application needs.
Brad Casemore, research director for data center networks at IDC, observed that by offering integrated SDN components, Pica8 makes testing, validation and deployment of SDN architecture easier on provider customers.
Earlier this month, Pica8 teamed up with NCLC and NTT Data to offer system integration services for end-to-end SDN solutions. Pica8 switches have been deployed in several reference architectures running OVS (Open vSwitch) with RYU, an OpenFlow 1.2 controller from NTT Laboratories.
The Pica8 Open Data Center framework will continue to leverage SDN to develop components needed to manage and provision the network. OpenFlow 1.2 and OVS enable GRE tunneling for overlays, traffic engineering to optimize network resources and SDN-based network taps that ensure application flow performance. These capabilities enable network architects to make better plans of deployment of SDN solutions and leverage the idea of managing individual flows.
These resources for configuring software release 1.7 are generally available on all four of Pica8’s 1 GbE and 10 GbE open switches.
