GEC NEWS WIRESupports OpenFlow 1.3 across IP Routing and Switching Portfolio
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 has 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.”
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.
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.
