Brocade introduced its Vyatta Controller as a keystone product in its SDN portfolio and 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 can be deployed as a Virtual Machine (VM) on any major hypervisor and is interoperable with Brocade MLXe, VDX, ICX, vADX and vRouter product families, as well as popular third-party network infrastructure equipment.
The Brocade Vyatta Controller is powered by the OpenDaylight Project, a community-led open source initiative aimed at accelerating the adoption of SDN and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). The company cited a number of early use cases, including:
- Bandwidth Calendaring
- Context-Aware Policy Enforcement
- Prioritization 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 optimization, 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 center.
“Network architects and data center engineers have been trained to manage the complexities dictated by vendors,” said Kelly Herrell, VP and GM Software Networking at Brocade. “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 organizations to dictate the pace of change so they can gradually integrate new solutions,” Herrell said. “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.”
The Brocade Vyatta Controller is planned for availability in November 2014 and will be based on the Helium release from the OpenDaylight Project.
