NEC announced the commercial release of Version 5.1 of its ProgrammableFlow Networking Suite, which introduces a new OpenFlow-based, software-defined data center interconnect solution – the Unified Network Coordinator (UNC).
NEC says its new UNC significantly improves the scalability of the network controller by 10 times over previous ProgrammableFlow controllers. This enables construction and orchestration of virtual networks across multiple controllers within a data center as well as across interconnects between data centers. The UNC’s capability of linking virtual networks across and between data centers gives customers the ability to link to specific policies within the UNC. In turn, users gain the ability to have an end-to-end policy across multiple controllers and multiple domains.
“We’ve found that our customers are looking for a policy-based approach to managing their data centers, which is now possible with NEC’s UNC,” said Don Clark, director of business development, NEC Corporation of America. “The ProgrammableFlow version 5.1 controller allows for better resource utilization and it simplifies data center management, both of which can increase service agility and reduce operating costs. Customers can deploy the UNC to move workloads across multiple data centers and control how traffic flows across WAN links. This allows the pooling of resources, which equates to better utilization of not only networks, but also storage and servers.”
As an illustration of its 10x* scalability, each ProgrammableFlow UNC controls up to:
- 10 controllers or 10 sites or 10 zones in a large data center
- 2,000 switches (compared to 200 switches per controller in previous version)
- 30,000 Virtual Tenant Networks (VTN)
- 100,000 VLANs
- 10 million flows
