LAS VEGAS, NV--(Marketwired - Aug 28, 2017) - VMworld 2017 - Big Switch Networks®, the Next-Generation Data Center Networking Company, today announced it will be a sponsor at VMworld® US 2017. At the event the company will demo Big Cloud Fabric™ (BCF), an intent-based SDN fabric for VMware SDDC workloads and Container Networking environments.
Big Switch will be at BOOTH #808, where engineers will demonstrate network automation, operational simplicity, intuitive user interface and innovative network visualization dashboards, across multiple VMware solutions including: VMware vSphere®, VMware NSX®, VMware vSAN™, VMware Horizon®, VMware vCloud® NFV™, VMware Integrated OpenStack, VMware vSphere Integrated Containers™. Additionally, Bala Ramachandran, Director, Product Management at Big Switch will speak on the panel: "Journey to a vSphere HTML Client Ecosystem: Deep Dive with Big Switch Networks," Thurs. Aug. 31, Noon PDT, alongside Yiting Jin, product line manager, cloud infrastructure at VMware.
"As organizations adopt SDDC technologies, our deepening partnership with VMware offers our customers improvements in agility as well as operational and cost efficiencies of enterprise networks," said Prashant Gandhi, Chief Product Officer, Big Switch Networks. "With Big Cloud Fabric and VMware's vSphere, NSX or vSAN, organizations can run their physical networks at the same pace as their virtualized environments, while dramatically simplifying operational workflows."
The network layer has traditionally been the least agile part of data center infrastructure to design, configure and operate, especially when compared to compute infrastructure. Today's status quo of managing networks via a time consuming and brittle switch-by-switch operational paradigm using a complex command line interface (CLI) approach, holds back organizations from achieving the full potential of the VMware SDDC since the networking silo of the datacenter cannot keep pace with the speed of innovation demanded by the business. Next-generation networks that provide intent-based workflows with modern architecture that is open and software-defined become paramount for VMware SDDC.
Big Cloud Fabric is a highly differentiated data center switching fabric that delivers zero-touch operations and network automation via an agile, SDN-based approach to physical network management. BCF incorporates design principles that hyperscalers like Google and Facebook use to build agile and flexible network architectures, via open networking hardware, core-and-pod design and SDN management. Big Cloud Fabric offers the same order of magnitude gains in network agility and ease of network operations to any organization, regardless of scale. BCF software is deployed on industry-standard open networking hardware from Dell EMC, HPE Altoline and Edgecore and resold by each partner's sales teams.
How BCF Supports VMware Workloads
BCF is a leading example of an SDN leaf/spine fabric architected as a logical scale-out switch to meet the needs of SDDC workloads for speed, flexibility and responsiveness and is unlike any switching solution on the market.
In VMware environments, BCF integrates with the VMware vCenter® API to provide physical network automation and end to end network visibility for all VMware vSphere® based solutions, including:
- VMware vSphere server virtualization
- VMware NSX® network virtualization deployments
- VMware vSAN environments
- VMware vCloud NFV for service providers
- VMware VIO
- VMware VIC
- VMware Horizon
- VMware vRealize Log Insight
- VMware vSphere Client and vSphere HTML5 Client Plug-in
BCF is the first SDN-based fabric with Plug-in certified for vSphere Web Client and vSphere HTML5 Client. The Plug-in is an important part of the solution that brings additional benefits for BCF provisioning and visibility specifically for vSphere VM administrator. It can provide a unified view of Big Cloud Fabric configuration corresponding to multiple vCenters that are connected to a single or multiple BCF pods. It automatically maps virtual network configuration of a virtual machine to associated provisioning flows on the physical fabric. Big Cloud Fabric test path feature for VM-to-VM connectivity checking is extended to the plug-in in order to provide end to end communication path visibility to VM admins. With VM admin and network admin having consistent view of virtualization and network environments, capacity planning as well as troubleshooting issues can be addressed rapidly. Additionally, BCF's Content Pack for VMware vRealize Log Insight provides in-built fabric analytics and significant operational value to VMware admins.
BCF supports multi-orchestration (VMware's vSAN, NSX or vSphere) environments via a unique virtual pod (vPod) architecture, which enables multiple orchestrators to operate within logically isolated domains while sharing a common physical networking fabric. vPod is ideal for use cases such as rapid CI/CD driven applications deployments, multi-tenant managed service environments to support varied customer workloads, and dev/test private clouds. By eliminating the need for dedicated infrastructure per orchestrator, BCF's vPod provides an order of magnitude acceleration in application deployment and service enablement.
Innovative Customers Are Using Big Cloud Fabric in VMware Environments:
Incheon U-City deployed Big Cloud Fabric as the physical network for its datacenter modernization initiative to realize the goal of becoming a software defined data center. The project delivered a highly automated network with seamless service and meaningful improvements in efficiency, especially for business operations and management, when VMware NSX was deployed on top of BCF. Incheon U-City reviewed alternative underlay fabrics, but found BCF to have superior technical architecture and that it would result in significant cost savings compared to other fabric solutions. In deploying software-defined technology, Incheon U-City was able to cut down nearly $10M in costs associated with platform building and integration and to save more than 60% of data center space.
Nomura Research Institute deployed Big Cloud Fabric as the physical network layer with VMware NSX. BCF was selected because of the significant scalability and operational efficiencies NRI was able to achieve through BCF's single pane of glass network management and zero-touch fabric. BCF's flexible, scale-out design allowed NRI to start at the size and scale that satisfied initial need while determining the best path to protect prior investments and future proof its network. BCF provided NRI with a choice of hardware and software across the layers of the networking stack and pay-as-you-grow economics, starting small scale and growing the fabric gradually, instead of locking into a fully integrated proprietary solution. This flexibility allowed NRI to fully experience the benefits of the SDDC by removing the silos that had been in place before its infrastructure was virtualized.
Dubai Municipality integrated Big Cloud Fabric with vCenter to automate network application deployments on the physical SDN fabric, which enabled onboarding of new applications without the need to manually provision the physical network. Dubai Municipality's network team experienced the following benefits: increased network performance and speed of bandwidth including 42x faster switching speed and a 16x increase in backbone capacity, and reduced infrastructure size to three consolidated physical data centers, while experiencing enhanced performance as a result of the next-generation SDN core-and-pod approach.
Cloud-Native Application & VM Monitoring with Big Mon
The rise of cloud-native applications, in the form of virtual machines (VMs) and containers has driven up east-west traffic within the data center, leading to tremendous visibility and security challenges. When applications are deployed in public clouds, consistent architecture for application traffic visibility becomes necessary.
Big Monitoring Fabric (Big Mon) brings visibility to any workload - bare-metal, VM, Container, on private or public infrastructure. Big Mon's SDN-based logical fabric architecture enables programmatic interactions with virtualization and cloud orchestration systems for both intra-server and inter-server traffic monitoring. Big Mon provides a flexible, SDN-programmable visibility infrastructure for monitoring VMware SDDC. For VMware SDDC, Big Mon controller leverages VMware vSphere Web Services APIs to dynamically SPAN VM traffic.
Intra-server and Inter-server VM traffic belonging to vSphere, NSX, and vSAN can be monitored easily. Big Mon supports two deployment modes for intra-server and inter-server VM-to-VM traffic monitoring:
- Continuous monitoring of VM traffic: Virtual switches can be configured to granularly SPAN VM-to-VM traffic leveraging built-in vSwitch traffic filters. The SPAN traffic is aggregated and processed by the Big Mon fabric as per monitoring policy and then sent to the associated monitoring tools. This mode is useful for continuous VM traffic monitoring.
- Dynamic monitoring of VM traffic: The Big Mon controller interacts programmatically with VMware vSphere to create an on-demand SPAN session for enabling VM-to-VM visibility. This mode is useful for immediate troubleshooting of VM performance or VM-to-VM connectivity issues.
Supporting Quotes
"Through advanced software-defined technologies such as Big Switch solution that are implemented in Incheon metropolitan area, we achieved both cost reduction and effective operation management," said Mr. Jongan Park, head of network department, Incheon U-City. "We are very much satisfied with the results, having an automated network and seamless services have led to higher business efficiency, especially in the aspect of operation and management."
"Dubai Municipality was able to deploy Big Cloud Fabric in only eight days, across three data centers, transforming the infrastructure from a traditional network topology to next-generation SDN," said Ahmad Mohamed Darwish Ali Emadi, chief information security officer, Dubai Municipality. "The success of this project was the result of the training provided to us from Big Switch at the company's U.S. headquarters and an intelligent, agile, and flexible solution. The complete configuration and deployment was done in-house, proving both our team's capabilities and Big Switch's technology."
"We are pleased to see Big Switch deliver further interoperability and deeper visibility with multiple VMware solutions to help accelerate production deployments of the software-defined data center. By providing additional automation of the physical network, Big Cloud Fabric enables our mutual customers to rapidly deploy applications," said Teri Bruns, vice president, Global Partner Solutions, VMware. "Additionally, consistent visibility across physical network and virtualization environments is an important benefit that helps IT teams resolve issues faster."
Supporting Materials
VMware Solution Exchange: Big Cloud Fabric Plug-In for vSphere Web Client and vSphere HTML5 Client
Solution brief: VMware vSphere with Big Switch Networks' Big Cloud Fabric
White paper: Big Switch Networks + Dell: Ideal SDN Fabric for VMware SDDC
White paper: Chaos Monkey, NSX and Big Cloud Fabric
Gartner Report: Magic Quadrant for Data Center Networking
ACG Research report: The Economic Advantages of Open SDN Fabrics
ESG Research report: Big Switch Networks and Dell EMC: Next-generation Data Center Networking
Explainer Video: Big Cloud Fabric
Data Sheet: Big Cloud Fabric
TechValidate: BCF + VMware SDDC
About Big Switch Networks
Big Switch Networks is the Next-Generation Data Center Networking Company. We disrupt the status quo of networking by designing intelligent, automated, and flexible networks for our customers around the world. We do so by leveraging the principles of software-defined networking (SDN), coupled with a choice of industry-standard hardware. Big Switch Networks has two solutions: Big Monitoring Fabric, a Next-Generation Network Packet Broker, which enables pervasive security and monitoring of data center and cloud traffic for inline or out-of-band deployments and Big Cloud Fabric, the industry's first Next-Generation switching fabric that allows for choice of switching hardware for OpenStack, VMware, Container, and Big Data use cases. Big Switch Networks is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with offices located in Tokyo, Sydney, London, and Istanbul. For additional information, email info@bigswitch.com, visit www.bigswitch.com or follow us on Twitter @bigswitch and LinkedIn.
Big Switch Networks, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Monitoring Fabric, BigSecure, Big Chain, Switch Light OS, and Switch Light VX are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.
VMware, VMworld, vSphere, NSX, vSAN, Horizon, vCloud, vCloud NFV, vSphere Integrated Containers, and vCenter are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and other jurisdictions.
Contact Information:
Analyst & Media Relations Contact
Kate Lehman
kate.lehman@bigswitch.com