Big Switch Networks Unveils Open SDN Suite

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A diagram of the three-tier-architecture for Big Switch Networks' Open SDN product suite. (Source: Big Switch)

Big Switch Networks announced the general availability of its Open Software-Defined Networking (SDN) product suite, with a focus on open standards, open APIs and platform-independence. The company said its product suite unifies applications and infrastructure across vendors, including support for both physical and virtual switches..

The company has built a large ecosystem of physical and hypervisor switch, security, cloud orchestration and application partners, including A10 Networks, Arista Networks, Broadcom, Brocade, Canonical, Cariden Technologies, Citrix, Cloudscaling, Coraid, Dell, Endace, Extreme Networks, F5, Fortinet, Gigamon, Infoblox, Juniper Networks, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, Mirantis, Nebula, Palo Alto Networks, Piston Cloud Computing, Radware, StackOps, ThreatSTOP, and vArmour.

“SDN is the most disruptive and transformative trend to hit the networking industry in over 20 years and Big Switch Networks Open SDN product suite delivers on the promise of the full potential that we envisioned when we started this company,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks.  “Big Switch Networks ecosystem ensures customers the broadest range of choice in physical and virtual infrastructure and applications, coupled with the industry’s only open network application platform. Our Big Virtual Switch network virtualization application enables up to 50% more VMs per rack, resulting in as much as $500K/rack in CAPEX savings and $30K/rack/year OPEX savings, based on a 40 server rack.”

The Open SDN suite is built around the Big Network Controller, which provides common network abstraction on network infrastructure and normalized policy and functions across the fabric. Big Tap gives enterprise-wide network visibility and allows filtering and directing traffic to meet analytical tool needs. Finally, the Big Virtual Switch dynamically provisions up to 32,000  Virtual Network Segments, improving virtual machine density and compute utilization. All three products are available immediately.

"We believe SDN has the potential to bring transformational change to the way companies build/manage their network to meet the challenges of highly dynamic and virtualized applications over the next few years,” said Steven Schwartz, Global Head of Telecommunications and Market Data Services at Goldman Sachs and Member of the Board of Directors at ONF. “As fellow members of ONF, we believe the commitment to open architecture, standards and frameworks will be critical to the innovation, adoption and evolution of SDN to address the dynamic needs of the enterprise network.”