News
Big Switch Releases Big Cloud Fabric-the First Bare Metal SDN Switching Fabric for Data Centers
July 2014 by Marc Jacob
Big Switch Networks introduces its flagship product, Big Cloud Fabric, taking another step in the company’s commitment to bring hyperscale networking technologies to a broader audience. The product is available to order today and will ship later this quarter.
In addition to the introduction of Big Cloud Fabric, the company is releasing Big Tap 4.0 and expanding its partner ecosystem. The announcement comes at a time when the company is seeing adoption accelerate — the company now has it first million dollar customer, and its largest production deployment now spans 16 data centers. Current customers span three continents and numerous verticals, including financial services, high tech, service provider, retail, government, and higher education.
Big Cloud Fabric:
Building on the success of the Big Tap monitoring fabric, Big Cloud Fabric is the next logical step for network architects embracing hyperscale design. Big Cloud Fabric is the industry’s first and only data center switching fabric that combines the operational advantages of SDN software with the economics of bare metal switch hardware. The product is designed for new pods in existing data centers and has been in beta with ten customers to date as a part of private cloud, big data, and VDI projects.
A data center pod built with the Big Cloud Fabric features i) a modern application/tenant centric configuration, ii) a massive reduction in management consoles required for day-to-day management, iii) integrated workflows for networking/security/audit teams (starting with OpenStack), and iv) industry-leading CapEx savings.
Like Big Tap, Big Cloud Fabric leverages the company’s Switch Light Operating System on physical leaf and spine bare metal switch hardware and supports the latest Trident II silicon from Broadcom. It is designed for 10G and 40G scale and resiliency, featuring headless mode high availability, zero-touch provisioning, L2/3 forwarding options, application-centric policy and service chaining. Management is available via OpenStack, Cloudstack, REST, CLI, or GUI. Details available here.
Big Cloud Fabric is available in two editions:
P-Clos Edition: a physical leaf and spine fabric targeting a broad range of data center environments, including KVM/OVS, ESX, Hyper-V, Bare Metal, or a mix.
Unified P+V Clos Edition: a physical + virtual fabric where leaf, spine and vSwitches are controlled by the Big Cloud Fabric Controller.
Introduction of Big Tap 4.0:
The company is also releasing Big Tap 4.0 this quarter, the next major release of this award-winning platform. Release 4.0 expands the addressable market with a new use case — tapping distributed, remote data centers — to complement recent wins in scale-out, "tap every rack" designs. The release has an increasingly rich filtering feature set including deeper packet matching, applicable for tunneled packets such as those found in mobile protocols and VXLAN. It also provides additional compatible hardware choices, including Dell open networking hardware as well as Accton/Edge-Core based Trident II switches. Big Tap 4.0 is available to order today. Details available here.
Partner Momentum:
Big Switch’s growing product portfolio and market momentum has attracted an ecosystem of partners spanning L4-L7 services, orchestration, big data, VDI, network/security monitoring, and application performance management. The company is announcing or expanding deeper partnerships with partners including A10 Networks, Accton Technology, Blue Coat, BlueData, Broadcom, Canonical, Check Point, Citrix, Dell, Edge-Core, FireEye, Fortinet, Garland Technology, Hillstone Networks, Hortonworks, Infoblox, In-Q-Tel, iwNetworks, Microsoft, Mirantis, Nexenta, Quanta Computer, Red Hat, Riverbed, and Telchemy. Details available here.
