Oracle Debuts New Ethernet Switches, Virtual Network Services

At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, Oracle announced new Ethernet data center switches and the addition of virtual network services to Oracle SDN.

Targeted at software-defined data centers and cloud, and touting low latency with massive scalability, Oracle says the new switches are optimized for Oracle engineered systems, servers, and storage, and are also used in its telco-focused Netra Modular Systems. Providing maximum port density, the new ES2-72 and ES2-64 switch models combine 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps ports with Oracle stack attributes such as routing on-demand management using Oracle Fabric Manager. The tool can connect up to 1,000 servers and 16,000 private virtual interconnects, according to Oracle.

"The transition to software-defined data centers has created new networking requirements where high speed and low latency are must-haves for most applications," said David Krozier, principal analyst at Ovum. "Oracle’s new ES2-64 and ES2-72 Ethernet switches ably address these requirements with impressive performance at what Oracle claims is a very competitive price."

With a new iteration on data center switch hardware the real spotlight is on Oracle SDN and new virtual network services to unify InfiniBand and Ethernet fabrics. Oracle says the new services create a single virtual instance for network functions such as firewall, load balancer, router, VPN and network address translation. Further appealing to the software-defined data center and cloud providers, Oracle notes that the new virtual network services can be daisy chained to enable configuration on either all of the services or a subset per tenant. Through a high availability feature, two virtual network service instances can be provisioned in an active/standby configuration.

"Cloud-enabled data centers are only as fast or as agile as their networking allows, which makes the convergence of software-defined networking and network services a next logical step in the evolution of the software-defined data center," said Raju Penumatcha, senior vice president, Netra Systems and Networking, Oracle. "Oracle’s new Ethernet switches and virtual network services in Oracle SDN help clear the way for enterprises to deploy key network services faster and gain high performance at the lowest cost."