Further strengthening its Software-Defined Networking (SDN) portfolio, Brocade has launched Brocade Vyatta Controller as the next stop toward delivering on the customer benefits of open networking platform strategy.
The SDN controller is built from the OpenDaylight Project open source initiative aimed at accelerating the adoption of SDN and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).
SDN and NFV, industry experts believe, provide high levels of agility and efficiency not possible in traditional IP networking. SDN is beneficial because it adds programmability into the network, creating application-driven performance-on-demand.
Worldwide, SDN adoption is growing at a new level. As per the recent report from IDC, SDN market will reach $3.7 billion by 2016.
The increasing adoption of cloud, mobile and social technologies by consumers and businesses has brought user-centrism to the strategic front for both IT organizations and service providers, Brocade said.
The new trend creates significant management and operational complexity for network engineers and architects to solve. These challenges also include adding significant new capabilities for network control and programmability. Addressing the issues collectively, the industry is starting to describe this as the migration toward the New IP.
“Networking must address the compounding forces of cloud computing, mobile and social, all of which have common characteristics of being on-demand and highly personalized,” said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research.
“The realms of compute and storage have already adapted to these requirements. However the network remains as static and unresponsive as it was from its original design point in the old world of IP,” Kerravala added.
The Brocade Vyatta Controller, according to Kerravala, is one solution to help the network unlock innovation and adapt to the demand-driven world.
The Brocade Vyatta Controller provides an open platform for the scalable management of end-to-end services across a wide range of underlying physical and virtual network infrastructure, such as switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs and load balancers. .
Easily deployed as a Virtual Machine (VM) on any major hypervisor, the Brocade Vyatta Controller is interoperable with Brocade MLXe, VDX, ICX, vADX and vRouter product families, as well as popular third-party network infrastructure equipment.
Among the initial applications available from Brocade will be the Path Explorer and Volumetric Traffic Management applications. Designed to provide topology awareness and path optimization, the Path Explorer application will be available concurrently with the Brocade Vyatta Controller.
The Volumetric Traffic Management application is planned for early 2015, and will help customers manage volumetric traffic attacks, as well as legitimate “elephant flows” in the data center.
The Brocade Vyatta Controller is planned for availability in November 2014 and will be based on the Helium release from the OpenDaylight Project, Brocade said.
