Brocade Certifies Virtual Network Tool for Mirantis OpenStack

Networking solutions provider Brocade has deepened its integration and relationship with Mirantis and its OpenStack distribution. The company has certified its open source virtual network automation tool Fuel for use with Mirantis and has been ensuring its network capabilities play nice with Mirantis-based clouds.

Brocade wants to enable virtual network automation atop of OpenStack, so it is certifying its offerings on major distributions of the popular open source cloud architecture. It provides the software-driven, automated and scalable network piece to Mirantis OpenStack.

Fuel was earlier certified for Red Hat's OpenStack distro. Enterprise interest and adoption of Mirantis made it an attractive second partner. The certification was based on a configuration of OpenStack based on Mirantis’ reference architecture.

Brocade is seeing a lot of enterprises kick the tires on OpenStack, according to Kenneth Ross, director of product management at Brocade.

“We’ve been very involved with OpenStack, with an umbrella strategy of enabling all our products,” he said. “When we get a customer deploying Ethernet fabric that wants to use OpenStack, we now have two partners in place.”

The network has been a focus in the OpenStack project for several years. Brocade and other vendors are looking to improve and virtualize the network within OpenStack and make sure their products gel with the world's most widely used open source cloud technology.

Ongoing efforts by legacy IT vendors to build OpenStack plug-ins for their products have made some in the OpenStack community concerned that the project may be steered in the wrong direction from what they believe was it's intended goal. Jim Morrisroe, CEO of major Mirantis competitor Piston Cloud Computing, told us earlier he thought all the plug-in efforts by legacy vendors were detrimental to the industry's progress toward a simplified cloud infrastructure built on low-cost commodity hardware.

Many companies are building network functions atop of OpenStack. Two examples are Avaya for its SDN offering and Siaras, which lets users carve out Wide Area Networks between clouds.

Brocade is also an example of a traditional tech company increasing its “open” strategy. In addition to making sure its offerings work with OpenStack, the company is active with the OpenDayLight SDN project and HP’s OpenNFV. Cloud is being driven by open source, so these companies need to provide “open” options to capture these users. Networking giant Cisco has also focused on OpenStack.

There’s been a significant change in terms of Brocade embracing open source. Ross said that the company sees a market much more receptive to using open source, looking for open architecture with no vendor lock-in. So the company is stepping in.

The company also has plug-ins for its Vyatta virtual router and virtual load balancing. They will be certified with both partners over the couple of months, according to the company.

Juniper, one of Brocade's biggest competitors, has taken its involvement with open source a step beyond all legacy network vendors Wednesday. The company announced it had designed a white box data center switch that would be open to use with any network operating system. Juniper also submitted the design for evaluation to Facebook-led Open Compute Project, planning to contribute it to the open source hardware design effort.