Working towards being one of the first networking vendors to establish a strong foothold in the soon-to-be wide adoption of OpenFlow 1.3, Brocade today announced support for the Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF’s) newest baseline standard across its entire IP routing and switching portfolio including its MLXe routers, and ICX and VDX switches. The company believes that with its richer feature set that includes Quality of Service (QoS), Q-in-Q, Group Tables, Active-Standby Controller and IPv6, OpenFlow 1.3 will meet the needs of commercial and enterprise networks in addition to those of research and academia who have already proven to be early adopters of the technology.
In its ‘Channel 2020’ global survey conducted last November, Brocade found that a quarter of the channel believes Software-Defined Networking (SDN) will be a significant trend by 2020. Hailing the new announcement to be another ‘milestone’ in the company’s long established support for SDN, Yarob Sakhnini, regional director MEMA at Brocade said, “Through our end-to-end support for OpenFlow 1.3, we have dramatically emphasized our commitment to the SDN model. These solutions will enable our customers to explore a completely new set of SDN use cases such as service chaining and real-time threat migration. It will also enable extension of SDN beyond the data center into campus and WAN environments.”
Brocade, through its MLXe router and carrier ethernet routers and switches, has shipped over one million OpenFlow-enabled ports and remains a strong supporter of OpenFlow. This commitment to the ONF standard has meant the company is capable of providing deployable and compelling SDN solutions such as its Flow-Aware Real-Time SDN Analytics OpenFlow application which has won the company a place in the finals of the Open Networking Summit’s SDN Idol competition.
The company’s Hybrid Port mode will allow customers to run OpenFlow forwarding on the same physical infrastructure as traditional networking protocols thereby allowing interworking between SDN and non-SDN networks.
“While we are now capable of offering end-to-end support for OpenFlow 1.3, we realise that the SDN momentum in the Middle East is still gaining pace and customers will need to gradually adopt this technology while ensuring a continued quality of service from their existing networks. The Hybrid Port mode means they can enjoy a steady and cost-effective migration instead of having to opt for a rip-and-replace approach,” said Yarob.
The Brocade ICX and VDX products are currently OpenFlow-enabled in hardware and are designed to provide software support later this year. Brocade has announced that OpenFlow 1.3 support for the MLXe, CER, and CES product lines is slated for June 2014. The company’s current customers would be able to upgrade at no additional cost.
