Big Switch Networks, a company founded in 2010 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, with a dedicated presence across more than 25 countries, has introduced its Cloud-First Networking (CFN) data center solutions portfolio encompassing new products and features for hybrid IT.
“Since the company’s inception, our focus has been on cloud principles,” said Douglas Murray, CEO, Big Switch Networks. “With our Cloud-First Networking innovations, we have partnered with our customers to build solutions that make the network a first-class citizen in a multi-cloud world. Organizations around the globe face the same networking challenges when it comes to hybrid cloud, and with CFN we are able to help organizations deploy applications more seamlessly and more efficiently by eliminating the network roadblock.”
New Features and Products
Big Switch Networks’ current on-premises products, Big Cloud Fabric – Enterprise Cloud (BCF-EC) and Big Monitoring Fabric – Enterprise Cloud (BMF-EC), are solutions offering key public cloud networking and monitoring features to on-prem workloads shipping in the next software release.
Building on these, Big Switch is announcing two new public cloud products, Big Cloud Fabric – Public Cloud (BCF-PC) and Big Monitoring Fabric – Public Cloud (BMF-PC) for corresponding in-cloud deployments. Finally, the company is introducing Multi-Cloud Director, a system for consistent hybrid design across on-prem sites, across clouds and across on-premises/in-cloud combinations of networking and monitoring fabrics.
Big Cloud Fabric-Enterprise Cloud (BCF-EC) with VPC Intelligence
- Intelligent VPC brings VPC style logical networking, providing consistent experience as public cloud, on-prem
- VPC Automation for any workload orchestrator (VMware, Nutanix, Red Hat, HCI, Kubernetes/Docker containers, OpenStack)
- Enables consistent on-prem networking for cloud-native applications, including those leveraging containers, for rapid migration to public cloud
Big Monitoring Fabric-Enterprise Cloud (BMF-EC) with VPC Intelligence
- VPC-style Flow Analytics using BMF-EC Analytics and Service Nodes that provide an AWS FlowLog-inspired analytics stack for generating, storing and visualizing ubiquitous flow data on-premises
- Automated monitoring of any workload, including cloud-native workloads
- Flow-level monitoring and analytics for all network and application traffic, and one-click traffic recording capability, together enabling Network Time Machine for on-demand capture and replay
Multi-Cloud Director (MCD)
As IT organizations scale-out BMF or BCF deployments, across multiple enterprise clouds and/or public cloud(s), they would require single console for management of common administration, compliance and visibility tasks. The MCD federates data from all BCF and BMF deployments, with a centralized database, centralized GUI, and centralized search intelligence. Different teams across the organization can access the data via the role-based access control (RBAC) interface.
Multi-Cloud Director offers global management of the following:
- Global configuration settings for any set of controller instances
- Controller, VPC, switch and end-point Inventory
- Geographic placement visibility
- Compliance reporting
- Centralized Dashboard and Alerting
- Integration with BMF and BCF
Big Cloud Fabric-Public Cloud (BCF-PC)
According to Big Switch Networks, VPCs have become the de facto approach for deploying multi-tenant networks in public clouds. Lack of consistency in VPC management and visibility would have caused mainstream organizations to slow-roll their adoption of public cloud. Also, VPC sprawl and the ever-increasing need for VPCs to interact amongst each other and with on-prem assets, are leading to complex architectures consisting of transit VPCs and App VPCs deployed with hub-and-spoke connections.
With BCF-PC, Big Switch Networks is enabling IT organizations to bring full governance to any VPC in any cloud, including configuration, visibility/troubleshooting, and delegated management. With BCF-PC, organizations would be able to leverage the same user experience, tenant pools, and compliance checks via a consistent approach to managing VPCs, whether in its on-premises enterprise cloud or within a public cloud.
BCF-PC would provide the following capabilities:
- Discovery and Visibility – VPCs already configured within an AWS user account, including inventory, usage and configuration data to perform compliance checks.
- VPC Connectivity and Latency Checks – Via BCF-PC network teams can check connectivity between AWS application instances, including latency measurements and communication path within or across VPCs
- Configuration of Application and Transit VPCs – Network teams are able to control the flow of communications between different tenant organizations and delegate VPC administration fully or partially to application owners.
- Security Policy Management – Management of App VPC Security Groups to control East/West traffic, and/or place access control policies for North-South traffic flowing through transit VPCs
- Centralized Management – Integrated with Big Switch’s Multi-Cloud Director for single-consol hybrid cloud management
Big Monitoring Fabric-Public Cloud (BMF-PC)
For many mainstream applications to move to public cloud, IT organizations would need sophisticated monitoring of VPC traffic, including deep-packet and flow monitoring, similar to that provided by on-premises visibility fabrics such as BMF-EC. Today, organizations are challenged because public cloud providers do not offer these capabilities.
BMF-PC would solve this issue, with the creation of a VPC-based network packet broker (NPB) in any public cloud. Packets are replicated and forwarded to the ‘monitoring VPC,’ from any workload, and/or VPC. Any cloud-based tools can be connected to BMF-PC for deeper security and application performance monitoring.
BMF-PC would offer the following capabilities:
- Centralized packet- and flow-based monitoring of all VPCs
- All visibility-related traffic is kept local for security purposes and cost savings
- All monitoring tools are centralized and tagged within the dedicated VPC for ease of configuration
- Access and use is controlled by multiple IT teams, based upon access rights and monitoring policies, thus reducing tool sprawl
- Integrated with Big Switch’s Multi-Cloud Director for centralized hybrid cloud management
