Big Switch Networks is the leader in Open Software-Defined Networking, and includes members of the pioneering team that developed the OpenFlow protocol at Stanford University. Software-defined networking (SDN) represents the most transformative architectural shift embraced by the networking industry in 20 years, and unlocks all new customer value through an open, flexible and programmable network architecture.
An Open SDN Architecture
Big Switch Networks is committed to an Open SDN platform that embraces industry standards, open APIs and open source. When looking back at major architectural shifts in the technology industry over the last 10-20 years, it is clear that open system architectures were among the most important trends driving innovation and customer value. The open architecture theme has repeated itself in personal computing, software development, mobile and other IT sectors. A platform open to contributions from an ecosystem of partners and the user community enables flexibility, choice, and reduced cost of ownership relative to traditionally closed, proprietary and inflexible architectures.
An Open SDN architecture embraces a common industry standard software protocol to abstract the network data plane from the control plane, and makes the underlying network fabric universally addressable and programmable by external software – a function not possible with traditionally closed, proprietary networking architectures. To date, the only available industry standard utilized to perform this function is OpenFlow. The OpenFlow protocol is sponsored and championed by the Open Networking Foundation, a non-profit industry consortium that includes some of the largest users in the world, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon and Goldman Sachs. An industry standard protocol, like OpenFlow, enables customers to deploy a mix of physical and virtual network infrastructure in their SDN, including multi-vendor options that eliminate vendor lock-in. An Open SDN also allows any software application to program the network fabric through open and published programming interfaces (APIs). Big Switch Networks embraces both of these architectural design elements, and has taken it a step further by contributing our core controller platform, Floodlight, to the open source community with an Apache open source license. Shared APIs between our commercial controller, Big Network Controller, and Floodlight provide customers assurance that their platform will always remain open.
No other SDN vendor is as committed to embracing an Open SDN architecture. And, that is evidenced through the uniquely broad support of Big Switch Networks large ecosystem of partners that are mutually committed to this Open SDN architecture. An open and standards-based architecture provides our customers and partners assurance that our platform will always remain independent and open. Period.
The Big Switch Networks Product Suite
In November of 2012, after two and a half years of development, Big Switch announced general availability of the industry’s first Open SDN product suite offering customers a range of new networking applications, including data center network virtualization. These products are the first in a series of new applications that are supported by a large array of deployment options available from our ecosystem of partners. Big Network Controller is the network application platform on top of which software applications can be built to program and automate the underlying network fabric. Big Network Controller manages and maintains the underlying network topology and state, and it provides programmable interfaces for northbound applications to make forwarding decisions. Big Virtual Switch and Big Tap are the first two of many applications that are commercially available for customer deployment. Big Virtual Switch is a data center network virtualization application that dynamically provisions Virtual Network Segments associated with cloud workloads to make the data center network as agile and flexible as cloud workloads. Big Tap is a network monitoring application that delivers ubiquitous and continuous network visibility utilizing standard OpenFlow-enabled Ethernet switches.
Big Switch Networks products have been deployed in customer networks since 2011, and our customers include innovators and leaders in their respective fields, including Goldman Sachs and Fidelity Investments. Join the growing list of IT and networking leaders. Join the movement towards an Open SDN.
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