Brocade, an American technology company specialising in data and storage networking products, recently introduced the Brocade Vyatta Controller as part of the company’s strategy that delivers an open and modular networking platform for cloud service providers.

The Software-defined networking (SDN) controller from Brocade that is scheduled for general availability in November this year is a key component of the company’s growing SDN portfolio. It will help organisations gradually migrate workloads running on their current equipment into an SDN environment and integrate new solutions, rather than a ‘rip and replace’ approach that is CAPEX intensive.

An SDN controller is a virtual machine (VM) that can be deployed on any major hypervisor, and is interoperable with common network infrastructure components. The controller also provides a RESTful API that can be used to support the customer’s applications and business logic. It provides a platform for applications to configure and optimise the underlying infrastructure, such as switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs and load balancers.

 With the Brocade Vyatta Controller, customers can design and deploy applications that improve network performance and delivery of new services. It is based directly on the OpenDaylight project’s controller. The OpenDaylight Project is a community open source initiative that was launched in April 2013 comprised of 41 vendors and focused on providing a common SDN Controller code base that will accelerate the adoption of SDN and NFV technologies.

The Brocade Vyatta Controller provides an open platform for the scalable management of end-to-end services across the widest range of underlying physical and virtual network infrastructure, such as switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs and load balancers. 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.

The use cases for Brocade’s Vyatta Controller include bandwidth calendaring, context-aware policy enforcement, prioritisation of unified communication traffic, security for issues such as DDoS attacks, advanced network programmability and control for heterogeneous NFV environments. Among the initial applications available from Brocade will be 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. 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. – TradeArabia News Service