Big Switch Networks, calling itself The Bare Metal SDN company, has appointed Jeffrey Wang as Vice President of Engineering. With a 15-year career at Cisco, he was most recently VP of Engineering in the Data Center Group. Wang will lead engineering for Big Switch’s pipeline of SDN Fabric solutions, including its Unified Physical + Virtual (P+V) Cloud Switching Fabric* currently in beta.
Wang held a variety of engineering leadership positions in data center compute infrastructure, switch software, physical switching fabrics and hypervisor virtual switching. His responsibilities at Cisco were ranging from Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) software to hypervisor switching and I/O technologies such as the Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) and the Nexus 1000v vSwitch.
Earlier in his career, Wang managed the software development team of the Cisco Catalyst 6500, the most widely used data center switch in the industry, and drove the popular Virtual Switching System (VSS). He was also an engineering leader at Nuova Systems, the Cisco-funded startup that became the centerpiece of Cisco’s data center portfolio. And in his earlier role as Vice President at Brocade, Wang was responsible for software development of Data Center IP Fabric solutions (VCS/VDX).
New CEO from Juniper
This follows the recent announcement of Douglas Murray joining Big Switch Networks as CEO. Murray comes to Big Switch from Juniper Networks, where he held various roles including senior vice president and GM of the data center security business and senior vice president of Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China.
Murray will guide the company’s strategy as its bare metal switching-based Software-Defined Networking (SDN) products launch into a rapidly growing market. Current CEO and co-founder Guido Appenzeller will continue with the company as Chief Technology Officer and board member, working closely with Murray on the next chapter of Big Switch.
* Big Switch Networks’ Unified P+V Cloud Switching Fabric solution combines SDN and bare metal switching, streamlining cloud network operations and bringing Amazon EC2 economics within reach of public and private cloud networks. Unified P+V Cloud Switching Fabrics bring together physical switches, hypervisor virtual switches and controllers as a unified system and are an alternative to costly Overlay/Underlay designs.
