HPE Adds Big Switch to Open Networking Community

This expands the reach of Big Switch's software offerings.

…intent-based principles to deliver agile and flexible datacenter switching based on SDN controls, HPE Altoline Open Networking switches, and fabric design. By deploying a disaggregated third party software / industry-standard switch hardware model, end-users can experience up to 50% TCO savings over legacy networks.

BCF delivers zero-touch operations, network automation, and deep visibility for software-defined data centers (SDDC) and cloud-native applications. BCF supports physical, virtual (multi-hypervisor), and container workloads and choice of orchestration software. It provides distributed L2 switching, distributed L3 routing, and L4-7 service insertion and chaining while ensuring high bisectional bandwidth. The scalable fabric is fully resilient with no single point of failure and supports headless mode operations.

The solution has built-in integration for VMware SDDC (vSphere, NSX, vSAN, VIO, VIC, Horizon, vCenter GUI and vRealize Log Insight), Red Hat/Mirantis OpenStack clouds, and Red Hat OpenShift/Kubernetes/Docker container environments. BCF can be deployed in existing data centers as a new pod without disruption to traditional networks.

Big Cloud Fabric Benefits

Simplicity: zero-touch fabric and single-point of management
Agility: network automation with vSphere, OpenStack and container integration, REST APIs for optional NetOps/DevOps automation
Visibility and Troubleshooting: Built-in analytics with historical replay, leaf-spine-leaf fabric tracing for rapid troubleshooting, end-point visibility at VM-level
Economics: Dramatic reduction in OpEx and CapEx
Innovation Velocity: Faster time to service enablement as well as rapid (hitless) software upgrade enables rapid consumption of new features

Big Cloud Fabric supports traditional 1G/10G/40G as well as newer 25G/50G/100G speeds for the most demanding and high volume network monitoring and security environments.

Support for Altoline Open Networking Hardware
The HPE Altoline is a family of disaggregated networking switches designed to accelerate the adoption of open networking in cloud data centers. Altoline offerings span the full spectrum of networking speeds — from 10, 100, or 1000BASE-T to 10GbE, 25GbE, 40GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE. Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric will support the following Altoline switches at GA:

Altoline 6960 — 25/100GbE spine/leaf switch — Tomahawk, 32 x 100GbE QSFP28 ports supporting 10GbE, 25GbE, 40GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE.
- The Altoline 6960 switch series provides an open network platform for high-performance spine/leaf deployments. Dig deeper into the hardware to see how you will benefit from:
  - High performance — Top-of-rack 1U 100GbE switch
  - High scalability — 32 x 25GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE QSFP28 ports (alternatively, 128 x 10GbE or 25GbE ports)
  - Flexibility — Deploying as 40GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE spine, or ToR with 10GbE or 25GbE to servers and 40GbE, 50GbE, or 100GbE uplinks
  - Easy network virtualization and cloud — VXLAN support, especially with Trident ii+ ASIC
  - Higher reliability — Redundant fans and power supplies for data center deployment
Altoline 6941 — 10/40GbE spine/leaf switch — Trident II+, 32 x 40GbE ports supporting up to 128 10GbE ports using breakout cables
Altoline 6921 — 10GbE leaf/spine switch — Trident II+, 48 x 10GbE SFP+ ports+6 x 40GbE QSFP+ uplink ports