Juniper Networks agreed to acquire Contrail Systems, a start-up developing software defined networking (SDN) solutions for approximately $176 million in cash and stock.
Contrail Systems, which is based in Santa Clara, California, was founded in early 2012 is still in stealth mode. No products have been announced so far. Juniper said the acquisition brings an SDN architectural approach that augments its portfolio of products and services.
Contrail is believed to be working on a virtualization architecture for very large cloud service providers with multiple data centers.
Contrail Systems is headed by Ankur Singla (CEO), who previously served as Chief Technology Officer and VP of Engineering at Aruba Networks. The Contrail team includes Dr. Kireeti Kompella (CTO), who was formerly CTO and Chief Architect, JunOS at Juniper; Pedro Marques,previously a developer of control applications for the Cluster Management Team at Google and before that a distinguished engineer at Cisco and Juniper; Harshad Nakil, previously at Aruba Fellow and also distinguished engineer at Juniper and Cisco; and others.
Juniper was a strategic investor in Contrail earlier this year. Khosla Ventures was also an investor.
http://www.contrailsystems.com
Some other recent SDN start-up news
Plexxi Unveils its SDN Switch with LightRail Optical Interconnect
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NoviFlow Debuts 100Gbps OpenFlow 1.1 Switch
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Big Switch Ships its Open SDN
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VMware to Acquire Nicira for $1 Billion for Network Virtualization
VMware agreed to acquire Nicira, a start-up focused on software-defined networking (SDN) for approximately $1.05 billion in cash plus approximately $210 million of assumed unvested equity awards. The goal of SDN is to allow enterprises and service providers to create the most flexible network topologies that seamlessly span any cloud environment. Nicira, which is based in Palo Alto, California, has developed a software-based Network Virtualization…
