Brocade seeks daylight for Vyatta SDN Controller

Brocade has launched its first software-defined networking solution, a controller aimed at providing a low-risk on-ramp to SDN and an open platform for management of services across physical and virtual networks.

The vendor says the offering, built continuously from the OpenDaylight Project, is a cornerstone product in its SDN portfolio and the next step toward delivering on the customer benefits of its open networking platform strategy.

The Brocade Vyatta – open in Sanskrit – Controller provides an open platform for the scalable management of end-to-end services across physical and virtual network infrastructure, such as swtiches, routers, firewalls, VPNs and load balancers.

Brocade says it provides 'a simple, low-risk on-ramp to SDN, with a fully tested and commercially supported open source platform that allows users to gradually migrate workloads running on their current equipment into an SDN environment'.

“Where other networking vendors are requiring customers to rip and replace networks in order to get access to new technologies, the Brocade Vyatta Controller enables organisations to dictate the pace of change so they can gradually integrate new solutions,” Kelly Herrell, Brocade VP and GM Software Networking says.

“This eliminates a majority of the risk and allows customers to cap their current infrastructure while focusing new spending on where it can accelerate innovation.”

Gary Denman, Brocade senior director ANZ, says trials have already begun in New Zealand with a couple of customers.

He says key customer bases are likely to be the telco and data center provider who are looking to fire up new services and applications at a faster rate and automate things from a remote pane of glass; and the larger enterprises who have their own data centers or who rent space in a data center.

Denman says customers are seeking increased speed to develop and automate services and the SDN model is 'a much needed evolution of the network'.

Vyatta is interoperable with Brocade's own offerings as well as popular third-party network infrastructure equipment.

The controller is due to be available in November and will be based on the Helium release from the OpenDaylight Project.