The San Francisco-based company targets new applications that run on its technology but can also run in Amazon and Google public clouds as needed. Juniper is already partnering with Cloudscaling which is using Juniper’s Virtual Network Control in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) feature that maps to virtual private clouds in Amazon Web Services.

The funding, “affirms that customers want more than OpenStack. They want an on-premise, OpenStack-based private or public cloud turnkey system solution that delivers architectural and behavioral fidelity with major public clouds like Amazon Web Services,” Cloudscaling CEO Michael Grant said in a statement.

It’s been a sort of rocky week for OpenStack. On Monday, Dell surprised the ecosystem by deep-sixing plans to roll out an OpenStack-based public cloud.

Cloudscaling closed a $4 million Series A round in September 2011. Company CTO Randy Bias, pictured above right, is an OpenStack Foundation board member, and will talk about issues and benefits of cloud adoption at GigaOM’s Structure Europe in September.

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Juniper says its Contrail software will be widely adoptable across devices from many vendors because it supports common protocols such as BGP and XMPP, although not OpenFlow. The controller “doesn’t have a dependency on a particular protocol like OpenFlow,” said Brad Brooks, vice president of marketing and strategy at Juniper. So network admins can run the software on much of their existing Juniper or Cisco gear. Still, the architecture of the Contrail software is flexible and could support OpenFlow in the future, said Jennifer Lin, Juniper’s senior director of product management (pictured).

As it prepares to sell the controller as part of a new software-licensing model for the company emphasizing the ability to pay for it independent of hardware, Juniper is following through on a long-term strategic shift. The strategy could help Juniper stay relevant with software that can work with current and forthcoming hardware, preventing commoditization while enabling centralized configuration and programmability and applications higher up the stack.

Those objectives are increasingly important as data centers become more complex and fluid with virtualization, multitenancy and rapid scale-out. Juniper wants to run networks that allow those things to happen easily — and stay in the hardware business, too.

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Both companies are already corporate sponsors but have applied to join the foundation itself and their applications will be voted on on Monday, according to the agenda for Monday’s OpenStack board meeting. That meeting kicks off the annual OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ore. A Juniper spokeswoman confirmed that company’s application. Ericsson could not be reached for comment.

Update: Mats Karlsson, VP of architecture and process for Ericsson, said the company brings an understanding of networking and telecom  to the table.  Stockholm-based Ericsson had already decided to offer OpenStack-based  services because it liked the open-source ecosystem and sees tremendous traction. The company has services in beta now with commercial roll-out slated for early 2014

Juniper and Ericsson are already corporate sponsors of the open-source cloud effort, but joining the foundation will give them them a seat on the board. the chance to win a seat on the board. It  also requires a funding committment of between $50,000 and $200,000. (The formula is pegged to company revenue per the OpenStack wiki.). Each of the eight top-tier Platinum partners –  AT&T; Rackspace IBM, HP, Nebula, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu — pony up $500,000 per year and must commit to a three-year tenure.

Other Gold members — the total number is limited to 24 companies — include Juniper rival Cisco Systems, Cloudscaling, Dell, Intel, Mirantis, Piston Labs(see disclosure), VMware and others.

Talk at the summit will no doubt focus on how  new features and functions of the Grizzly release of OpenStack can bring value to customers. Folks will especially be watching for new customer stories. Most of OpenStack’s case studies to date revolve around tech companies —  HP, Intel, Cisco/Webex — all of which are building OpenStack implementations for their own use or which they they want to sell. Now, with Grizzly being the seventh major release of code, it’s time to show OpenStack traction in the world beyond the tech bubble.

This story was updated at 8:45 a.m. PST with Ericsson comment.

Disclosure: Piston is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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SDN involves the abstraction of the network’s brains, as it were, from its hardware. This is analogous in some ways to server virtualization, in that it makes it much easier to build smarter systems on top of commodity hardware. Juniper’s take on this sees the network as four layers, namely forwarding, control, services and management — in Juniper’s vision, everything but the forwarding layer should be centralized.

Lin, who joined Juniper through the company’s acquisition of SDN specialist Contrail Systems, said at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York on Wednesday that federating the control function and eliminating “manual error-prone processes” would help the big data because:

“We’re seeing a huge opportunity here to reposition the role of the network as a curator of big data and make sure that role is easily exposed through abstractions of the network. The role of the network is interesting because the network is the only thing that’s globally pervasive and … uniquely knows a lot of the contextual information that is required to drive insights back into the system.”

Lin argued that this “rich context” would enable new types of business models such as collaborative data exchanges, without anyone needing to worry about the technology architectures involved. “The role of the network is changing quite heavily and the pace of innovation for hyperconnected data is really astonishing,” she added.

Check out the rest of our Structure: Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

A transcription of the video follows on the next page

Go to page 2 (of 2) on GigaOM .

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Earlier this week I wrote about how NTT Communications has been rolling out SDN at multiple data centers around the world, to automate network configurations and provide other benefits. I also learned about how Peer 1 Hosting has signed up for SDN vendor Embrane’s software to round out the Peer 1 Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offering, and I found out that SunGard has started using those same products to lower response times for its Recover2Cloud disaster-recovery enterprise cloud. The increased agility from SDN and other innovations lets SunGard promise response times that are 30 to 40 percent shorter, and the company expects to offer better service-level agreements to its own customers as a result.

Meanwhile, SDN company Nicira, which VMware acquired last year, has identified Rackspace, AT&T and DreamHost as customers. All three of those companies provide hosting services alongside other offerings.

In 1999 or thereabouts, service providers were quick to jump onto the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) bandwagon as a way to help information travel faster on a network, said Ram Shanmugam, SunGard’s senior director of product management. Now many of those same companies are standing up as early adopters of software-defined networking.

And as that happens, it’s only natural for enterprises to witness the benefits of SDN and decide to give it a try, Shanmugam said. And thanks to SunGard’s market position, the shift could happen soon: Over 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SunGard for disaster recovery, Shanmugam said. Going forward, more SunGard clients could get exposed to the perks of SDN, as the company has been discussing the inclusion of SDN as well as software-defined storage for SunGard’s enterprise cloud.

More SDN products hitting the market will also speed up adoption of the technology, which virtualizes networks and enables users to automatically provision firewalls and load balancers in a few minutes — something that took an engineer hours or days to do with a hardware appliance. The vendors are ready for the demand increase, or getting closer to that point. Networking hardware vendor Juniper Networks, soon after acquiring startup Contrail Systems, announced plans to release products later this year and next year that will allow for consolidation of hardware and connect network services on multiple devices. Cisco said in November 2012 it would buy Cariden, a company that’s come up with SDN strategy. And just last week F5 Networks, another hardware vendor, acquired LineRate Systems, which is looking to help companies take on more web traffic with more easily scalable networks, as my colleague Derrick Harris wrote.

So far, the promise of better agility has been one of the best motivators for companies to try out Embrane’s SDN products, and cost savings have taken a back seat, said Dante Malagrinò, Embrane’s CEO. This is somewhat a contrast to the adoption of server virtualization, where costs savings drove adoption among enterprise customers and the benefits of agility were only perceived later.

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Typesafe CEO Mark Brewer

“A year ago most of the apps [using Scala] were scale-out big web applications like Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn but in that time we started seeing more traditional business applications where developers chose Scala over Java,” Brewer said. He said many developers find Scala more lightweight and streamlined than Java itself.

“Scala is extremely intuitive and … it is also extremely easy to access libraries from Java,” said Jason Pressman, a Shasta managing director who is now joining the Typesafe board.  Shasta has a history of backing open-source-oriented companies including LucidWorks, once known as Lucid Imagination, and Makara, which was acquired by Red Hat and became the basis of its OpenShift platform as a service.

Typesafe will also continue to build out the Scala-Akka stack adding more components like the recently announced Slick database connector, which makes it easier for developers to use Scala with relational and non-relational databases.

The new funding comes a year and a half after Typesafe netted a $3.5 million Series A round and includes contributions from existing backers Greylock Partners and Francois Stieger.

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Typesafe CEO Mark Brewer

Details are slim since neither Juniper or Typesafe will say what — if any — technology Scala and Akka will replace — there are current Juniper job postings seeking programmers with Java, C and C++ experience. Nor did the companies detail what products Scala and Akka will be used for. Still, the endorsement by a big network hardware company is worth noting.

In a statement, Will Eatherton, VP of engineering for Juniper’s core routing business, said that the Typesafe Stack — including Scala and Akka bring a “fresh approach to software development.” Using those tools, he added, Juniper developers will be able to “quickly and reliably create distributed software based on Akka middleware that can scale to take advantage of modern multi-core processors.”

That statement gets to what makes Scala special. The language makes it easier to write code for multiple processor cores and Akka eases creation of distributed applications that run across many servers.

Typesafe recruits new CEO from VMware

To boost Scala’s profile, Typesafe earlier this month brought aboard a new CEO in Mark Brewer, former VP of business operations for VMware’s Cloud Application Platform. Brewer also joined the board, joining Martin Odersky, Typesafe Chairman and Chief Architect , Bill Kaiser, and François Stieger.

Brewer said while at Springsource and then at VMware, (he joined VMware when it acquired Springsource three years ago) he kept an eye on Scala’s and Akka’s progress and was intrigued by what he saw.

“Akka is really the best lightweight, distributed platform for running Java or Scala apps — it runs across cloud in a very light fashion — we couldn’t do that at VMware. And we started to see adoption in the enterprise — not just in web property companies,” he said. ”LinkedIn and Twitter use Scala for its performance but now we’re seeing Scala and Akka in use at more traditional enterprises,” Brewer told me in a recent interview.

Booming demand for Scala and Akka

He points to significant growth in the past 12 months with downloads of Scala more than doubling from 28,000 to 60,000  and Akka downloads quadrupling from 4000 to 20,000 in that period.

And, while he does not see the Scala/Akka tandem competing with VMware’s software development stable now given that many Spring projects can work with Scala projects, that will change:

“We’re not competitive today but most definitely in the future we’ll compete with VMware,” he said.

According to Github, the bible of software developers, Scala is now the 17th most-watched programming language, after such crowd pleasers as JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Java, C++ and others, but is coming up fast, Brewer said.

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In addition, Cisco can buy the start-up for upto $750 million. Insieme, which has been aggressively trying to woo engineers from its rivals, is hoping to build new kinds of switching gear to compete with current market leaders such as Arista Networks and emerging players.

Cisco has made an investment of $100 million in Insieme, an early-stage company focused on research and development in the datacenter market. It was founded by Mario Mazzola, Luca Cafiero, and Prem Jain in February 2012. Cisco also has the right to purchase the remaining interests of Insieme, with a potential payout range of up to $750 million that will be based primarily on the sales and profitability of Insieme products through Cisco. [Full Internal Cisco Memo below]

Cisco has used this concept of spin-ins before and often they involved the same three founders — Mazzola, Jain, and Cafiero. However, when I read this memo, I see a company making a tactical admission that it has become so big, so bureaucratic and so broken that it cannot count on internal teams to build any ground breaking products. The SDN memo, at least from my perspective, sends the wrong message to Cisco’s engineering corps: you are worth more outside than you are inside Cisco.

Cisco which has made a fortune from selling routers and switches should be thinking about developing next generation platforms. The fact it can’t shows that as a company it has become addicted to the old way of doing things.

Cisco boasts that nearly 70 percent of the Internet runs on its gear. Except Google and Facebook don’t use Cisco. And neither do many of the emerging web scale companies. Cisco, of course dismissed Juniper Networks and later the Chinese threat. Anyway that is a story for another day.

SDN: Evolving the Network as a Platform

2012-Apr-17

Market trends such as cloud, mobility and video and the proliferation of data highlight the vital role the network plays today. The network is no longer a cost center; it is central to revenue generation and strategy execution. This has led to an increased need for customers to have greater control over the network (and IT infrastructure, in general) paving the way for emerging trends such as software defined networking (SDN), which promises to make the network more agile, scalable, and cost-effective.

While there is debate over whether this evolution is occurring today or coming in the near future, one thing is certain: Cisco intends to lead this change.

“Cisco believes SDN is part of our vision of the intelligent network that is more open, programmable, and application aware—a vision in which the network is transformed into a more effective business enabler, says Padmasree Warrior, CTO and co-leader Engineering.

Because SDN is still in its embryonic stage, a consensus has yet to be reached on its exact definition. Some equate SDN with OpenFlow or decoupling of control and data planes. Cisco’s view transcends this definition.

“If you ask five customers what SDN means to them, you may get five different answers. Customer motivations and expectations are different based on their business problem or deployment scenario,” Warrior says.

Unlike any other company, Cisco is unique in its experience, expertise, and breadth to help customers evolve their networks in a phased manner, offering both innovation and investment protection.

Playing to Cisco Strengths, Priorities

While SDN concepts like network virtualization may sound new, Cisco has played a leadership role in this market for many years leveraging its build, buy, partner strategy. For example, Cisco’s Nexus 1000V series switches—which provide sophisticated NX-OS networking capabilities in virtualized environment down to the virtual machine level—are built upon a controller/agent architecture, a fundamental building block of SDN solutions. With more than 5,000 customers today, Cisco has been shipping this technology for a long time.

“SDN plays into at least two of Cisco’s top five priorities—core routing/switching and data center/virtualization/cloud,” says Warrior.

Cisco has the opportunity to shape and define the SDN market because it is still perceived as an emerging technology, Warrior says. In fact, Cisco innovation will be much deeper than just SDN.

Cisco is operating from established positions of strength, which include the scale of its operating systems, superior ASICS, unique embedded intelligence, experienced engineering expertise, and an expansive installed base—most of which has no interest in completely replacing what it has already invested in so heavily.

“When you look at the breadth of our customer base—from universities to large enterprises to Service Providers —you quickly see that there is no one-size-fits-all solution in terms of implementing SDN,” says Warrior. “So it’s a matter of ‘turning on’ this functionality in a use-case led manner that allows customers to tailor their infrastructure to business priorities, while maintaining as much investment protection as possible.”

“Many of our peers are just starting to recognize the strategic value of the network that Cisco has always articulated—and the majority of them are still at the starting line,” says Warrior. “We understand this is a marathon—not a sprint—and Cisco has the most comprehensive set of capabilities to address the emerging requirements under the SDN umbrella, better than any other company.”

Investing in SDN Through Build, Buy, Partner Strategy

Cisco’s innovation strategy continues to leverage a build, buy, partner approach. Our network programmability efforts align with this strategy.

Cisco has made an investment of $100 million in Insieme, an early-stage company focused on research and development in the datacenter market. It was founded by Mario Mazzola, Luca Cafiero, and Prem Jain in February 2012. Cisco also has the right to purchase the remaining interests of Insieme, with a potential payout range of up to $750 million that will be based primarily on the sales and profitability of Insieme products through Cisco.

Insieme’s product development efforts are complementary to that of Cisco’s current and planned internal investments. Insieme and other internal programs will be components of Cisco’s broader programmability framework. These types of investments have strongly benefitted Cisco in the past, and we will continue to look for similar ways to complement our internal development capabilities.

More details regarding Cisco’s investment in Insieme will be disclosed in Cisco’s upcoming 10Q filing in May.

Defining the Strategy

Warrior says Cisco’s SDN strategy is part of our on-going investment to ensure that the networks we deploy are the most agile, open, and programmable. This includes everything from silicon to software, as well as supporting industry-developed protocols such as OpenFlow and OpenStack.

Collaboration will be key. Cisco’s SDN strategy is led by Engineering with involvement from experts from various teams such as Network Operating Systems Technology Group (NOSTG), Data Center Group, Service Provider Architecture Group, Global Marketing and Corporate Communications (GMCC), Sales, as well as support teams from Finance and Legal. As it is tied to several of the company’s key foundational priorities, progress will be reviewed and monitored by the Operating Committee in regular quarterly business reviews.

“Our strategy is to continue to offer choices to our customers so that they are not forced to go down a single path,” Warrior says. “We have a multipronged approach that goes beyond current perceptions of SDN, leveraging business-based use cases as building blocks so that we achieve architectural consistency and bring to bear the richness of all our capabilities.”

Warrior adds that Cisco already builds a lot of intelligence into its network silicon and software. Making them open and programmable will further unlock the value, while enabling further application awareness.

“Cisco understands networking better than any other company,” Warrior says, noting that Cisco-built networks that power majority of the Internet today. “Whether we partner, build or buy, Cisco is well positioned to continue to lead with the evolution of SDN.”

Over the next 6-12 months, Cisco is expected to unveil its external approach with new products and solutions, including SDN capabilities that make the network more open and programmable. Stay tuned for more information on Cisco’s strategy in this space.

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IBM and NEC laid out some case studies of real customers using their gear inside their data centers, providing a much-needed affirmation that software-defined networking, and more importantly the OpenFlow protocol, is moving outside academia and trials. The OpenFlow protocol is a way to separate the intelligence required for routing packets in a network from the device actually doing the routing. Using the protocol, one can create a programmable network that is abstracted from the physical hardware underneath, a so-called software-defined network.

I have covered NEC’s efforts in this area and its controller, which handles the actual intelligence inside a software-defined network. IBM’s switch, which it launched last November, handles sending the packets. The two companies are working together to provide a level of hand-holding and predefined networking configurations to enterprise and corporate clients that might otherwise shy away from the nascent OpenFlow protocol and the legion of startups building opportunities around it.

On Tuesday, the two companies said that Stanford, the home of the OpenFlow protocol, is using their gear to make a programmable network campus-wide. Stanford is using the network programmability to provision bandwidth on demand for areas of campus or researchers that need it. Other companies using the IBM and NEC gear are data providers Tervela and Selerity, a financial information provider. For the most part, it sounds like IBM and NEC are trying to help explain what OpenFlow is good for: namely adding the same agility to a company’s networking operations that server virtualization has enabled for its development efforts.

This is a welcome shift from breathless coverage about the benefits of the OpenFlow protocol that dominated last year. Now we are to the point where products are out, and we will finally see what a software-defined network can do. Bandwidth on demand, prioritizing certain types of traffic so they get the most resources, and improvements in network security are all on their way — and for a fraction of the investment made in previous generations of gear.

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