Kaloom, a start-up based in Montreal with offices in Santa Clara, California, has collaborated with Red Hat around the launch of the Red Hat virtual central office solution, a Virtual Central Office (VCO) solution for multivendor NFV deployments at the edge.
Kaloom has developed a Software Defined Fabric (SDF) for automating and optimizing data center networks based on open networking white box switches.
Kaloom’s SDF, which is designed to virtualize the data center, leverages P4-based programming capabilities initially in switching silicon from Barefoot Networks. A physical data center can be partitioned into multiple independent and fully isolated virtual data centers (vDCs). Each vDC operates with its own Virtual Fabric (vFabric), which can host millions of IPv4 or IPv6 based tenant networks.
The joint solution with Red Hat leverages Kaloom’s programmable fabric to help increase the performance and lower the latency for NFV applications. Specifically, Kaloom said its solution enhances CPU utilization for virtual network function (VNF) applications by offloading sophisticated service chaining functionality and embedding it into the data plane to accelerate overall performance and lower latency. It offers integrated service chaining offload, virtual cloud router and virtual switch capabilities. It also provides customers with a way to program their infrastructure using the open standards-based P4 programming language to add new services and capabilities.
“We see a strong need among current beta and other potential customers to have an open multivendor NFV solution. Our advanced service chaining capabilities significantly increase performance and lower latency delivering better overall network performance and lower costs for data center operators,” said Laurent Marchand, CEO and founder of Kaloom. “Red Hat is a great partner for us to bring this solution to market.”
“As more mobile network operators look to embrace the role of a modern open telecommunications service provider, moving services from the core network closer to customers by virtualizing edge networks becomes an important consideration,” said Darrell Jordan-Smith, Vice President, Global Information and Communications Technology at Red Hat. “Red Hat virtual central office solution is designed to provide both a path for service providers to follow and an open pluggable framework upon which to build their next generation services by leveraging our partner ecosystem’s strengths and technologies.”
