SDN-based Big Cloud Fabric delivers networking at the speed of virtualisation for SDDC
Big Switch Networks has announced significant new capabilities of Big Cloud Fabric (BCF), including comprehensive networking support for hyper-converged solutions powered by VMware vSAN and virtual desktop and application solutions with VMware Horizon, as well as multi-container networking support for Mesosphere DC/OS and Kubernetes container orchestration platforms, including Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. With further increases in performance, scale and deployment flexibility, Big Cloud Fabric is the ideal next-generation switching network for the software-defined data centre (SDDC).
Big Switch will host a special launch webinar on Wednesday, February 8 at 10am PT. Douglas Murray, CEO and Prashant Gandhi, Chief Product Officer will discuss the latest innovations in Big Cloud Fabric and Jim Duffy, Senior Network Analyst, 451 Research will share next-generation data centre networking trends and the impact to hyper-convergence. To register for the webinar: http://bit.ly/2j2vB6v
“Innovation velocity is imperative for companies around the world who have turned to Big Switch to make their vision of a next-generation data centre a reality,” said Douglas Murray, CEO, Big Switch Networks. “Interoperability in heterogeneous environments is mandatory for modern networks. With these latest innovations, we continue to deliver on our promise of differentiated networking solutions that surpass the requirements of our most agile and innovative customers, while offering unprecedented operational simplicity and the ability for network, compute and storage teams to seamlessly work together.”
Big Cloud Fabric is inspired by and incorporates design principles hyperscale organisations like Google and Facebook use to build agile and flexible network architectures leveraging software-defined networking (SDN) controls, open networking switches and fabric design. Big Cloud Fabric is the optimal networking fabric for OpenStack environments as well as multiple VMware solutions via a single point of integration for the entire fabric. In VMware environments, BCF connects with the VMware vCenter API to provide physical network automation and end to end network visibility for VMware vSphere. BCF is an ideal SDN network fabric underlay for VMware NSX network virtualisation deployments, VMware vSAN environments, and VMware vCloud NFV for service providers. In addition, BCF’s Content Pack for VMware vRealize Log Insight™ provides in-built fabric analytics and significant operational value to VMware admins. BCF enables networking to operate at the speed of virtualisation.
In container environments, the BCF controller enables both virtual and physical network automation as well as fuller visibility of container-to-container traffic across the network, via integration with Mesosphere DC/OS, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform orchestrators managing Docker or Mesos containers. Automated, policy-based rapid application and micro-service deployment is now possible via BCF without having to wait for manual switch-by-switch operational steps required with legacy networks. For integrating with container orchestration systems, Big Cloud Fabric leverages the standards-based Container Networking Interface (CNI) plugin framework to automate both physical and virtual networking.
Hyper-converged-ready data centre networking
As IT departments seek to improve productivity while decreasing OpEx and CapEx, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) has become the preferred architecture because of its scale-out flexibility and operational simplicity. BCF is also ideally suited for HCI solutions powered by vSAN due to cluster-level visibility provided directly within the BCF Analytics dashboard for simplified management and faster troubleshooting. Additionally, BCF also includes one-click multicast for vSAN, enabling streamlined deployment. Enhanced automation, simplicity and visibility of East/West traffic in scale-out hyper-converged environments significantly streamlines operational workflows between network, compute and server teams. With a dedicated vSAN dashboard, BCF’s Fabric Analytics supports historical and real-time telemetry and the ability to visualise vSAN nodes and clusters. Big Switch is also extending Big Cloud Fabric’s support for VMware Horizon deployments, thus enabling rapid provisioning of virtual desktops and VDI-aware visibility. Big Cloud Fabric is a networking “easy button” for any VMware workload.
Container-ready data centre networking
As the demand for container technology accelerates in enterprise and service provider data centres, a next-generation networking architecture is required to keep up with the rapid lifecycle of container instantiation, elasticity and retirement. Switch-by-switch legacy networks are ill-suited for container workloads with traditional CLI management, which makes orchestration-driven provisioning of workflows extremely tedious. Deep visibility is necessary for network managers to track what hosts (virtual or physical) containers are running on, when they are invoked, scaled, turned off and if they move.
With this release of Big Cloud Fabric, Big Switch is showcasing API integration for Mesosphere DC/OS container orchestration, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Kubernetes managing Docker or Mesos containers and the ability to deploy heterogeneous container environments on the same physical fabric. Big Cloud Fabric delivers unprecedented network automation for container connectivity, container-to-container troubleshooting and container-level visibility, which ensures the network can be configured for rapid and scale-out container deployment. Container network visibility and in-built analytics dashboard for containers ensures that networking teams can easily identify where issues originate: container, server, or network, which is critical to reducing time to troubleshoot and resolve application performance issues. Additionally, BCF supports multi-container environments via a unique virtual pod (vPod) architecture, which enables multiple orchestrators to operate within logically isolated management domains while sharing a common physical networking fabric. vPod is ideal for use cases such as rapid CI/CD driven applications deployments, multi-tenant managed service environment to support varied customer workloads, and dev/test private clouds. By eliminating the need for dedicated infrastructure per orchestrator, BCF’s vPod provides tremendous CapEx savings while bringing an order of magnitude speed-up in application deployment and service enablement.
Additional Big Cloud Fabric enhancements
BCF’s fabric-level innovations now deliver greater performance, scale and reach. Updates include:
- Extreme Performance — support for 25G/100G open networking switches
- Dell EMC Z9100-ON (32x100G)
- Edgecore AS7712-32X (32x100G)
- Enhanced Scale — 128-leaf pod fabric supporting 5000+ physical servers and tens of thousands of virtual machines/containers
- Broader Reach — L2 extension using VXLAN for inter-pod and inter-DC connectivity
- VMware vSphere 6.5 support
Customer adoption
Dubai Municipality chose BCF for its next-generation data centre network, which is fully integrated and orchestrateable with VMware and future-proofing to support OpenStack environments. Dubai Municipality’s data centre modernisation project was part of the Smart Dubai initiative, which aims to create a city where all its resources are optimised for maximum efficiency, where services are integrated seamlessly into daily life, where it protects both its people and information, resulting in a more enriched life and business experience for all.
Dubai Municipality’s deployment leverages a “core and pod” approach which provides enhanced visibility and automation for vSphere server virtualisation deployments. The Big Cloud Fabric controller integrates directly with VMware vSphere to automate the network application deployment on the physical SDN fabric. With Big Cloud Fabric, Dubai Municipality was able to:
- Combine its three data centres to one logical network domain, which resulted in the reduction of physical and logical migrations costs by 90%
- Increase switching speed by 42x
- Increase backbone capacity by 16x
- Increase network performance, speed and bandwidth
- Reduced overall infrastructure size
- Reduced migration complexities and costs
- Increased visibility into critical network traffic via fabric-wide span
The second phase of Dubai Municipality’s data centre modernisation project is to deploy VMware Horizon VDI, which will integrate with Big Cloud Fabric so that Dubai Municipality is able to simplify, automate and rapidly provision its VDI environment.
Company momentum
Organisations around the globe continue to select Big Switch Networks for data centre modernisation, evidenced by a customer count that more than doubled in 2016. The company also continues to expand its geographical footprint, most recently by establishing a dedicated presence in the EMEA region in Q4 2016, and into China and the ANZ region in Q3 2016. In the latest quarter, the company saw more than 100 transactions over 50 of its customers, and now has more than 10 customers who have purchased US$1M+ in recurring software licences. Customers are located across more than 25 countries in verticals that include technology, financial services, government, media, telecom and higher education. Customers include: Verizon, the U.S. Federal Government, Intuit, American Fidelity, Emerson, National Instruments, CleanSafeCloud, Dubai Municipality, Digita Oy, U2 Cloud, DeNA, 10 of the 15 largest telcos in the world, multiple global financial services firms, and media companies.
Availability
Big Cloud Fabric Release 4.0 is currently shipping.
Big Cloud Fabric support for container orchestration is available for customer demonstrations.
Resources
Blog: Big Cloud Fabric Innovations for Hyper-converged, Containers and SDDC
Video: Big Cloud Fabric Explainer
Video: BCF VMware VDI Demo
Video: BCF Red Hat OpenShift Container Integration Demo
Video: BCF Mesosphere Container Integration Demo
Data Sheet: Big Cloud Fabric 4.0
White Paper: What is Big Cloud Fabric
White Paper: Big Switch Networks + Dell: Ideal SDN Fabric for VMware SDDC
White Paper: Big Cloud Fabric: Single SDN Fabric for Multi-Container Ecosystems
Case Study: Dubai Municipality Drives CapEx Savings and Operational Simplicity
Case Study: One seamless solution supports it all (U2 Cloud)
Supporting quotes
“As global data centre modernisation continues, it is important that the network can efficiently support these new demands,” said Jim Duffy, Senior Analyst, Network, 451 Research. “The new capabilities Big Switch is introducing in Big Cloud Fabric could make it an ideal physical network fabric for the SDDC, and in containerised environments, BCF should easily keep pace.”
“Open Networking is predicated on disruption, delivering news levels of choice and capability to an industry that has long been getting short-changed on innovation,” said Jeff Baher, vice president, Dell EMC Networking. “We’re proud of the partnership that we have with Big Switch Networks and applaud their continued efforts to advance our industry with their latest release of Big Cloud Fabric 4.0.”
“Open networking solutions provide a low cost and flexible infrastructure aligned to our customers’ operational requirements,” Jeff Catlin, VP Technology, Edgecore Networks. “Edgecore Networks open network switches, together with Big Switch Networks’ Big Cloud Fabric provides customers with complete SDN solutions that reduce capital and operating costs while enabling more rapid provisioning of new applications and capacity. This newest release of Big Cloud Fabric will deliver greater performance and scale to our customers.”
“Mesosphere DC/OS makes it easy to deploy containers and big data services and scale them elastically across both on premise and public cloud infrastructure, enabling companies to quickly bring new applications to market,” said Tobi Knaup, co-founder and CTO at Mesosphere. “For enterprise-class container deployments, it is mandatory that networking be easy to manage, automated, and keep up with the speed of containers, which traditional box-by-box networking cannot do. Our customers need to have a networking solution that complements container technology, rather than acts as a bottleneck. With Mesosphere DC/OS container orchestration and Big Cloud Fabric, we offer our customers a solution that enables them to get the full benefit of containers.”
“We are pleased to see Big Switch continue to partner with VMware and extend networking support to VMware Horizon, and enhance support for VMware vSAN via one-click automation for streamlined deployment, simplicity and visibility of East/West traffic,” said Teri Bruns, vice president, Global Partner Solutions, VMware. “Big Cloud Fabric provides physical network fabric for multiple VMware solutions, including VMware NSX, vSphere, vRealize, vSAN and Horizon. We look forward to working with Big Switch to provide these next-generation solutions to our customers so they can fully experience the benefits of a software-defined data centre.”
“Organisations are turning to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as their enterprise-grade container technology platform to help accelerate both stateful and stateless application deployments,” said Chris Morgan, OpenShift Ecosystem technical director at Red Hat. “Big Cloud Fabric integration with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform offers network administrators more simplified container networking automation and a more consistent view of their networking environment. This networking capability is a key component as companies transition from traditional bare metal and VM-based applications to containerised microservices.”
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, Sydney, London and Istanbul. For additional information, email info@bigswitch.com, follow @bigswitch, or visit www.bigswitch.com.
About Red Hat
Red Hat and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. The OpenStack Word Mark is either a registered trademark/service mark or trademark/service mark of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries, and is used with the OpenStack Foundation’s permission. Red Hat is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community.
