GigaOM » Brocade

Brocade unveils network virtualization software and gear

Jordan Novet — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 12:00:10 +0000

Brocade on Tuesday unveiled new software following on its November acquisition of Vyatta, showing that the network vendor, like Cisco and others, is indeed going after higher layers of the networking stack.

It sounds as if Brocade wants to bill itself as the company that can generate network resources on the fly, only when and where they’re needed. It’s also investing heavily in software, a move that could bring it into competition with giants such as VMware.

Among the new products are a couple intended for network-function virtualization. Brocade’s Vyatta vRouter can virtually set up and configure networks on the fly. It’s available through Amazon Web Services’ marketplace. The Virtual ADX is intended for fast application delivery and control of application management.

Brocade also has decided to make its VCS fabric for connections across hardware available as a plug-in for OpenStack, so users can scale out their networks across multiple clouds.

While software is in the spotlight, Brocade also has a new four-port, 40 GbE card for its MLXe router. The card’s ports support both OpenFlow and traditional routing protocols.

I expect more vendors could follow suit as hardware vendors continue to push their software lineups; hype surrounding software-defined networking and network virtualization continues, and companies wonder what they should try. That means we’ll see a lot of new products hit the market, even as customers try to hire to figure out how to wade through all the FUD.

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2012: The year software-defined networking sold out

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:41:06 +0000

The network was the star of the data center this year as hype around software-defined networking hit the mainstream tech press and consciousness of IT professionals. There were company fundings, massive acquisitions and a glut of company launches. So while a lot of ink has been spilled this year, the changes in networking this year have led to more confusion than coherency about what software defined networking is and what its promise is for the industry.

After two years of trying to figure out what OpenFlow was and how it might change networking for the better, 2012 was when the promise of OpenFlow morphed into software-defined networking, which was later co-opted into network virtualization. Things are still heating up, but let’s look at where we’ve been.

Guido Appenzeller (left) and Kyle Forster of Big Switch

OpenFlow, a protocol that came out of Stanford as part of the Clean Slate project, is pretty simple. The idea is to separate the control plane from the data plane in a networking box. Thus, the same box no longer has to choose the right route for a network request as well as actually send the packet along the route it chose. In practice, this has the potential to commodify the router, but in reality what happened has been the rise of software-defined networking, or SDN. So while Google built hardware and software based on the Open Flow protocol to help optimize the traffic flows for its inter-data-center traffic, most other companies looking at OpenFlow quickly fell in line with the concepts of building a programmable network that virtualized the underlying hardware.

This was the concept of SDN. Under that title, the physical hardware of a network was abstracted from the virtual machines and applications running on the network. Sometimes OpenFlow might have a hand in this and sometimes it won’t.

Instead of commodifying the router, these companies added a layer of software between the networking gear and the application, generally known as the controller. Some of these were open source, some provided APIs for the accessing the underlying networking gear and some did not. The point in SDN was that once you had this virtualization, it became possible to link your network to your application. Depending on whose controller you used, this process was easier or more difficult.

Dante Malagrino, Co-Founder and CEO, Embrane; Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners; Martin Casado, Co-Founder and CTO, Niciria
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

Toward the latter half of 2012, some vendors started pushing the concept of network virtualization as synonymous with software-defined networking. The companies basically tried selling network virtualization as the solution, which then meant they could determine the winners and losers for applications and services that would rely on a virtualized network, such as scaled-out firewalls. It’s a co-opting of the term SDN, but for many customers this is probably what they want — for today at least.

With that framework in mind, here are the notable deals in the networking world in 2012.

Oracle buys Xsigo: This deal, which was announced in July, wasn’t really an SDN deal. Xsigo has really tried to grab ahold of the SDN banner with its marketing, but it was about the virtualization at the hardware and port layer. Xsigo’s hardware (plus fabric) make it possible to plug storage and networking cables into a Xsigo box and then allocate those physical resources without a network engineer having to get involved. Oracle buying Xsigo fits with its proprietary hardware plans and less with any sort of Oracle SDN play.

Nicira’s CTO Martin Casado

VMware buys Nicira for $1.26 billion: This deal, announced in July, is all about the controller and control. Nicira made an SDN controller that works to abstract the underlying networking hardware from the applications. But in many ways it’s a network virtualization play as opposed to seamlessly connecting applications to the networking layer. Instead, the controller is the control point where Nicira and now VMware will let partners and maybe other vendors hook into the controller via an API or partnership program.

Brocade buys Vyatta: Vyatta is another company that tried to give itself an SDN facelift. In this case, Brocade, the company better known for making switching hardware took the bait (or was simply merciful), and said it would buy Vyatta while the company was making the rounds trying to raise another round of venture capital. Brocade can use Vyatta’s networking software to move up the stack and possibly provide a more modular approach to SDN that allows customers to piece together Broacde’s hardware and software if they so choose (but they won’t have to choose both as they might in a Cisco or Arista decision).

Cisco to buy Cariden for $141 million: In November, Cisco purchased a network mapping and optimization company that has recently adopted some SDN features (and marketing). For Cisco, buying Cariden made sense because it delivered the type of controlled network virtualization ecosystem that posed no danger to Cisco’s router business, but allowed Cisco to sell SDN services and applications to its service provider customers. Meanwhile, Cisco this year also announced its own controller layer and an API to let applications talk to it (but not the underlying Cisco gear.)

Juniper to buy Contrail for $176 million: Finally, last week Juniper said it is buying Contrail, a startup in the SDN space that had only launched a day or two prior to the acquisition announcement. The deal came just a few months after Contrail had received $10 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, with Juniper participating as a strategic investor. Contrail’s technology centers around rethinking where the controller would sit in a virtualized network and how those pieces work together. It had a great team and good-sounding tech, but few real customers.

The year isn’t over and it’s possible one of the myriad networking startups funded this year, such as Big Switch, Pluribus Networks, Pica8, Plexxi and/or Cyan might end up getting bought before we close the books on 2012. But even if that doesn’t happen, I’m comfortable saying this is the clearly the year SDN has sold out and networking has really broken out.

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The promise of SDNs in the enterprise

doyleresearch — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 17:13:54 +0000

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How Vyatta buy helps Brocade in a software-defined world

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:41:06 +0000

Brocade, the networking and switch company, is buying Vyatta, a company that pioneered the idea of open-source routing software, in a bid to compete in a networking world where software-defined networking severs the link between networking software and the box that it sits on.

Brocade has been a proponent of Open Flow, the protocol that separates the management of packets in a network from the actual movement of the packets, and thus allows companies to build out networking hardware on commodity boxes instead of expensive switching and routing gear with proprietary operating systems. The company had laid out a strategy earlier this year to use Open Flow-compatible switches, but also planned to build an overlay that would allow a customer to use both Open Flow-enabled hardware as well as their current gear, so customers could avoid replacing their entire networks.

But Brocade is also aware that without some higher-level software and services associated with its switches (or at least contributing to its coffers), it’s going to be stuck making low-end commodity hardware. With Vyatta, which has been trying to push its OpenFlow and SDN strategy for the last two years, it now has an operating system to run on top of its switches as well as services. From a blog post written about the deal:

One of the most exciting things about this announcement is that Brocade is already the leader in Ethernet fabrics, which serve as the foundation for the cloud and simplify the physical infrastructure of the network. Brocade’s Ethernet fabric technologies combined with Vyatta’s software networking solutions offer the ideal platform to empower SDN deployments where flexibility, mobility and rapid deployment are paramount requirements.

Software is eating the networking world and Brocade is rushing up the stack trying to ensure it can deliver some higher-value services. While this looks like the rebuilding of an integrated networking stack with different providers stitching together their wares, Brocade at least has paid lip service to the fact that its gear and software will have to work with products from others in order to keep serving customers. Like VMware, when it purchased Nicira this summer for $1.26 billion, Brocade is mentioning OpenStack as well as it’s ability to work with a variety of hypervisors.

What’s unclear is how far Brocade’s software-defined networking vision will go. The promise of software-defined networks and Open Flow is that you can now build applications that can interact with the network. In earlier interviews, Vyatta’s CEO Kelly Herrel focused a lot on the value of SDN as a way to virtualize networks and reduce the physical challenge of reconnecting cables every time someone wants to move a virtual machine.

Likewise, the virtualization aspect is something Nicira’s president Steve Mullaney has talked up in our conversation last month at Structure: Europe. However, that is just the beginning and doesn’t really even need Open Flow — which is precisely the point.

The cynic in me sees that the goal here seems to be using the idea of software-defined networking and the hype around Open Flow to move the control in the network from the switches to a controller slightly higher up the stack, while making it open in the sense that providers can petition the controller makers for access or integration through an API or through partnerships.

Given Vyatta’s open-source history, I’m not sure if this deal will perpetuate that mindset or if it will create a more open controller platform that lets developers build services that can talk to the networking gear just like it lets the networking gear talk to the application. Not every company will want that, but it is the ecosystem that would provide the greatest opportunity for startups and for disruption.

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The promise of software-defined networking

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 06:55:56 +0000

The software-defined networking (SDN) market is expected to soar in size to $2 billion by 2016. Growth this fast may very well signify that SDN is the third epoch of computer networking, which will change everything. Large and small firms will be able to compete with established players like Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent by rapidly adding software features to low-cost merchant-silicon-based network products. And there is the promise of Stanford University’s OpenFlow protocol. This report provides the big ideas motivating a systemic change of the computer-networking industry, and it includes 10 observations and assessments that will guide readers toward open networking.

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Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 06:55:39 +0000

Cloud computing continues to change and shape the technology industry, and these days discussions are about more than simply reorganizing the IT department. New developments in chip and hardware architectures, finding greener data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying data analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. For this report, GigaOM Pro has gathered six of its analysts to discuss these topics and others in current cloud market. Here we present several areas to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud.

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Brocade’s SDN vision sheds some light on OpenFlow’s evolution

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:42:17 +0000

Brocade has joined the parade of vendors, large and small, trumpeting their software-defined networking strategies. The company, which makes networking chips and gear, laid out a strategy that offers a Brocade-specific fabric (watch here for the technical details!) as well as an ability to operate an OpenFlow network simultaneously with an existing network.

Brocade has been a proponent of the OpenFlow protocol for the last two years, and on Tuesday it laid out its product plans, including gear that will make it possible to run both a traditional network and an OpenFlow network on the same switches. This is a pretty significant feature, since a large complaint among users is that OpenFlow traffic and traditional Layer 2/3 traffic can’t run on the same network.

Keith Stewart, director of product management with Brocade, says many of the service provider customers are eager to use software-defined networks to deliver new services, but will still expect and need to run their traditional networks in parallel. Without a way to bridge both options, OpenFlow wasn’t appealing. So while Google made waves by turning the network between its data centers to an all-OpenFlow network, customers like AT&T have too many customers and such complex networks that such a shift doesn’t make sense.

I also got Brocade’s take on the evolution of the networking virtualization world. Many companies are launching products and companies in this space, but it’s still unclear how things will shape up. Stewart says he believes that customers will end up using different controllers for different applications, which means products from Big Switch could coexist with Nicira’s stuff or even fabrics from large vendors.

Brocade also introduced its VCS Fabric technology that will help shuttle virtual machines around a data center without manual configuration. This is a hot topic among the large vendors that see the need for some kind of configuration management tools for virtualized networks to help automate some of the provisioning. The server world has a variety of tools, including Puppet and Chef, but among vendors that include IBM, Cumulus Networks and now Brocade, the need for some kind of provisioning overlay is worth investing in. It’s still unclear what end users will want, though, since most folks deploying SDNs are fairly sophisticated and are comfortable solving problems with legions of smart engineers rather than software.

As for widespread adoption, it’s still a ways off and when it does come, the likelihood is that vendors will have to play nicely with others. “[T]he vertically integrated approach isn’t going to work here,” Stewart said.

So look for companies to create an ever-shifting web of partnerships and agreements between each other all carefully labeled as open thanks to their use of OpenFlow. Underneath, however, we’ll see that certain partnerships will offer more user-friendly pairings for a higher cost, while bare bones equipment and offerings will be cheap and dumb and perfect for giant webscale and cloud companies that have time and engineers. Does that mean networking will need its own version of OpenStack? We’ll discuss this and other SDN-related topics with Nicira, VMware and others at our Structure 2012 conference in June.

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The new iPad has CIOs quaking in their cubicles

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 01:11:04 +0000

Apple’s newest iPad has some new elements that could make it a (bigger) hit in the enterprise, such as a higher-resolution screen for video conferencing and presentations as well as taking dictation. But it has become increasingly clear to corporations that their networks can’t handle the iPad or, really, most of the devices employees are bringing into their walls.

We have done a lot of coverage on how iPads have made inroads into the enterprise, with 64 percent of mobile workers now carrying a tablet, and that will rise to nearly 80 percent within the next six months, according the Mobile Workforce Report (you can see the iPad breakdown below). In general, the number of mobile devices coming into corporate networks has grown to 3.5 devices, up from 2.7 in 2011, according to the same report, which was released earlier this week.

So many devices, such a static network

But the problem with iPads and mobile devices in general is that they move, and so your network resources have to move too. Or at least adapt to ensure that when someone has an impromptu meeting by the water cooler, there is enough network capacity to serve those devices. Before, when people computed and connected from their desks, it was much easier to predict where the network needed to have the most capacity.

Much like the networking trends happening inside the data center or out on the cellular networks, where scale and flexibility are becoming essential ingredients, the networks inside companies are due for their own tune-up, driven in part by devices like the iPad. As our computing has become more mobile and varied depending on the device, the once-staid world of networking has had to adapt — everywhere. The best explanation so far of this trend comes from Pradeep Sindhu, the director, vice chairman of the board and CTO of Juniper. In an interview with Om last year, Sindhu said:

The nature of traffic today is increasingly dynamic. And so the old ways of addressing and building networks, with very statically provisioned technologies, like circuit switching, is essentially dead. So you have to rethink this architecturally. Point number two is that I believe that the traffic is going to get a lot more stochastic in nature. In other words, unpredictable, both with respect to any given circuit and with respect to the sources and destination the amount of usage will continue to explode and they will get more and more dynamic and unpredictable.

Companies also have to figure out how to revamp their corporate device policies to ensure data is kept secure. Aruba, a wireless equipment firm, offers this slide to explain all the considerations an enterprise must think about.

The iPad and the big enterprise networking shift

As the new iPad launches with better screens and better video conferencing and presentation capabilities, those responsible for corporate networks are a wee bit concerned. Depending on whom you ask, some are very concerned. Brocade, which on Tuesday launched a series of products that makes corporate networks programmable and flexible, polled 120 IT managers and found that about half ~~are worried in some way about~~ anticipate traffic changes thanks to the coming iPad.

And even if the iPad isn’t mentioned by name, the trend of bringing in consumer devices to the network is leading to opportunities not just for firms making tablets such as Apple but also those on the back end charged with building and securing corporate networks. Companies like Brocade, Aruba, Cisco and others are watching today’s launch and hoping it drives a few more CIOs to ring up their salesmen.

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OpenFlow and beyond: future opportunities in networking

Stacey Higginbotham — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 18:40:35 +0000

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Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:01:55 +0000

Big data and Platform-as-a-Service offerings highlighted the second quarter, suggesting that we can expect to see a shift in enterprise IT practices around application development and analytics very soon. On the PaaS front, we saw new projects like DotCloud and Cloud Foundry gain incredible momentum in just a few short months. The big-data activity ranged from major new Hadoop vendors to heavy investment in flash storage that will speed the serving of data to processing engines. In other areas, we saw an uptick in cloud-computing plans from large vendors, OpenStack continued to mature and pick up both contributors and users, and Facebook caught our eye by launching an open-source project around the designs for its specialized servers and data centers. Additional companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Salesforce.com, IBM, Heroku and Calxeda. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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