Pica8 announced support for Labeled BGP on bare-metal, white box switches — a new network overlay solution with applications for service providers and cloud data center operators.
Pica8 said the approach will appeal to many large enterprises who are pursuing a VXLAN / VMware model for multi-tenant services, workload mobility and overlay networking within their data centers.
The new capability, which is part of Pica8’s latest SDN release (PicOS 2.6), is similar to MPLS in that it uses labels to establish service tunnels across the network. Label BGP adds the
dynamic programmability of SDN. BGP is a signaling mechanism carriers can use to create MPLS paths; but today this function is only available in expensive edge routers from the likes of Cisco and Juniper. This capability in Pica8’s OS, coupled with white box economics, gives carriers a far more cost-effective alternative to deploying this technology.
“We are seeing a real debate in the “how” of offering end-to-end services inside and between data centers,” said Olivier Vautrin, head of product management at Pica8. “The need is real if you want to deploy hybrid cloud services and to accomplish that, you need a flexible and proven encapsulation technology. We believe MPLS and Labeled BGP offers that opportunity and the experience in the market is there. Once MPLS is used in the data center, complex stitching technologies between data center and WAN encapsulations are not needed anymore. This is disrupting traditional data center edge devices by adding this functionality into our hardware-agnostic white box switching OS.”
