Brocade talks open-source SDN strategy

Brocade is building the basis of a strong software-defined networking (SDN) ecosystem with the introduction of the Intel x86-based Brocade Vyatta Controller as one of the keystone product, and quickly following the Vyatta announcement with enhancements to its Vyatta-compatible MLXe family. 

Source: Brocade. Judd.

Increasing adoption of cloud, mobile and social technologies by consumers and businesses has brought the user experience to the fore for IT organisations and service providers. The new emphasis is changing how network services are deployed, managed, and created. According to Brocade, the industry is starting to describe these changes as the migration toward the New IP.

CK Lam, Director, Data Center Fabric and Virtualization, Asia Pacific, Brocade, explained that SDN tells virtual routers what to do without configuring physical router boxes individually, making it easier to control networks and make changes quickly.

"In the past, every vendor had a different way of configuring a network device. They communicated with each other via standard protocols, but orchestrating and management as a whole is complex. A standard controller that controls devices across different vendors is true interoperability," Lam said.

According to Lam, Australia is already quite far along on adopting SDN, while India, Korea, and Japan, are also interested in it. "For Thailand, Indonesia, it's the first time they're hearing about it and it's like a light bulb has just gone off," he said. "It's almost a question of moving to the next stage, proof of concepts, pricing."

"When you deploy SDN, the internal ROI in terms of what you save, but also the services you deploy on the other side, is quite incredible. If you look at tier one carriers today anywhere in the world, they employ thousands of people to run their network. The new cloud service providers will do it with a hundred people, with literally a fraction of the size. There's no way in the world that traditional service providers can compete with the traditional service model," added Adam Judd, Vice President for Asia Pacific at Brocade. 

“Networking must address the compounding forces of cloud computing, mobile and social, all of which have common characteristics of being on-demand and highly personalised,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. 

“The realms of compute and storage have already adapted to these requirements. However the network remains as static and unresponsive as it was from its original design point in the old world of IP. The Brocade Vyatta Controller is one solution to help the network unlock innovation and adapt to the demand-driven world.”

The Brocade Vyatta Controller provides an open platform for the scalable management of end-to-end services across a wide range of underlying physical and virtual network infrastructure, such as switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs and load balancers. It provides a low-risk on-ramp to SDN, with a fully tested and commercially supported open-source platform that allows users to gradually migrate workloads running on their current equipment into an SDN environment.

The Vyatta SDN controller is based on code from the OpenDaylight Project, a community-led open source initiative aimed at accelerating the adoption of SDN and network functions virtualisation (NFV) in order to provide levels of agility and efficiency not possible in traditional IP networking. By introducing open source into the SDN equation, Brocade says customers are not locked in to any one vendor, and do not have to do forklift upgrades. They can innovate on their own, or partner with the very active OpenDaylight community to develop new capabilities that their networks require. Some of the early use cases customers can take advantage of are:

- Bandwidth calendaring
- Context-aware policy enforcement
- Prioritisation of unified communication traffic
- Security for issues such as DDoS attacks, such as automating decisions on suspicious flows so that the controller drops them
- Advanced network programmability and control for heterogeneous NFV environments
- Load balancing

“Network architects and data centre engineers have been trained to manage the complexities dictated by vendors,” said Judd. “The Brocade Vyatta Controller is the first commercially supported open source solution to remove that vendor lock-in from the network and allow the user to deliver the innovation that the network needs.”

“Where other networking vendors are requiring customers to rip and replace networks in order to get access to new technologies, the Brocade Vyatta Controller enables organisations to dictate the pace of change so they can gradually integrate new solutions,” Judd added. “This eliminates a majority of the risk and allows customers to cap their current infrastructure while focusing new spending on where it can accelerate innovation.”

One way of looking at a commercially-controlled open source controller, said Judd, is the same way Red Hat plays in the open source world of Linux, or Cloudera with Hadoop. 

Brocade hardens the controller, adds software to make installation easier, ensures that the documentation is well-organised, and provides support, explained Lam. Users are free to go directly to the open source community, but would not enjoy the same benefits are buying something that is commercially available.

Easily deployed as a virtual machine (VM) on any major hypervisor, the Brocade Vyatta Controller is interoperable with Brocade MLXe, VDX, ICX, vADX and vRouter product families, as well as popular third-party network infrastructure equipment. As a result,network architects and administrators can operate their multivendor networks holistically on the basis of policy and desired behaviour that is specific to their needs. As the network infrastructure evolves to integrate NFV and other emerging technologies, the Brocade Vyatta Controller provides a strategic bridge between existing and next-generation architectures.

As it is powered by an open source platform, the Brocade Vyatta Controller also offers more options on developing or sourcing new applications. It provides a stable open source development platform for organisations and commercial third-party developers, with complete portability to any OpenDaylight-based controller. With direct access to the controller code and the support of leading developers from Brocade and its peers across the OpenDaylight community, customers can accelerate application and feature development by leveraging the community and independent developers, while retaining full intellectual property rights.

“The momentum behind the OpenDaylight Project is unlike anything else the networking industry has experienced and that is because the customer demand for an open, software-defined platform is louder than ever before,” said Neela Jacques, Executive Director of the OpenDaylight Project. “Brocade has been among the most active contributors and the Brocade Vyatta Controller is not only a testament of its commitment to the OpenDaylight Project, but to delivering open networking solutions.”

Brocade will also develop applications for the Vyatta Controller. Initial applications will include the Path Explorer and Volumetric Traffic Management applications. Designed to provide topology awareness and path optimisation, the Path Explorer application will be available concurrently with the Brocade Vyatta Controller, in November. The Volumetric Traffic Management application is planned for early 2015, and will help customers manage volumetric traffic attacks, as well as legitimate “elephant flows*” in the data centre.

*Elephant data flows are long data transmissions across the network that tie it up for a relatively long time, impacting network bandwidth. They are called elephants in contrast to 'mice', or short data flows such as emails or web pages.