Big Switch Networks, a provider of next generation data centre networking solutions, announced it has received Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform Prime designation, and at the Red Hat Summit demonstrated support for solutions including Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Ceph, Enterprise Linux, Ansible by Red Hat and OpenShift Container Platform.
Specifically, the Big Switch Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) has achieved prime designation for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, with the integration designed to simplify container networking by enabling unified physical and virtual networking. As a result, BCF can be used to deploy container-based applications without the need to implement detailed networking configurations.
The new capability allows uniform networking across applications running on VMs, containers and bare-metal servers within the same Big Cloud Fabric environment, and is designed to provide benefits including:
1. Fabric automation for containers via auto host detection and LAG/MLAG formation, auto network creation (for vSwitch, leaf and spine) and IPAM and automated container network configuration.
2. Container networking visibility, including for container-name, vSwitch and vNIC, container-to container fabric trace and fabric analytics.
3. Simplified operations via a unified view of physical and virtual switches and streamlined container integration deployment workflows.
Big Switch noted that leveraging the collaboration a major Tier-1 carrier has deployed the BCF and Red Hat OpenStack Platform to create a large-scale network functions virtualisation (NFV) OpenStack cloud.
Red Hat recently released Ansible 2.3, the latest version of the agentless open source IT automation framework that is designed to provide enhanced performance, flexibility and networking capabilities. Big Switch noted that it is a contributor to Ansible to help customers achieve system-wide network automation across SDN fabrics, BCF and Big Monitoring Fabric, plus security using the BigSecure architecture.
