Brocade has launched its Brocade Vyatta Controller as a keystone product in its Software-Defined Networking (SDN) portfolio and the next step toward delivering on the customer benefits of its open networking platform strategy. Commercially supported by Brocade, this SDN controller is built continuously from the OpenDaylight Project, a community-led open source initiative aimed at accelerating the adoption of SDN and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) in order to provide levels of agility and efficiency not possible in traditional IP networking.

The increasing adoption of cloud, mobile and social technologies by consumers and businesses has brought user-centrism to the strategic front for both IT organizations and service providers. Along with required changes in how network services are deployed, such as NFV, this trend has also added significant management and operational complexity for network engineers and architects to solve. These challenges also include adding significant new capabilities for network control and programmability. Addressing the issues collectively, the industry is starting to describe this as the migration toward the New IP.

“Networking must address the compounding forces of cloud computing, mobile and social, all of which have common characteristics of being on-demand and highly personalised,” said Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “The realms of compute and storage have already adapted to these requirements. However the network remains as static and unresponsive as it was from its original design point in the old world of IP. The Brocade Vyatta Controller is one solution to help the network unlock innovation and adapt to the demand-driven world.”

The use cases for SDN are directly proportional to the applications developed and deployed. By introducing open source into the SDN equation, customers are free to innovate on their own, or they can partner with the vibrant OpenDaylight community to develop new capabilities that modern networks require. Some of the early use cases customers can take advantage of are:

• Bandwidth Calendaring
• Context-Aware Policy Enforcement
• Prioritisation of Unified Communication Traffic
• Security for Issues Such as DDoS Attacks
• Advanced Network Programmability and Control for Heterogeneous NFV environments

“Network architects and data center engineers have been trained to manage the complexities dictated by vendors,” said Kelly Herrell, VP and GM Software Networking at Brocade. “The Brocade Vyatta Controller is the first commercially supported open source solution to remove that vendor lock-in from the network and allow the user to deliver the innovation that the network needs.”

Getting Started with SDN

The Brocade Vyatta Controller provides an open platform for the scalable management of end-to-end services across a wide range of underlying physical and virtual network infrastructure, such as switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs and load balancers. 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 organizations to dictate the pace of change so they can gradually integrate new solutions,” Herrell said. “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.”

Easily deployed as a Virtual Machine (VM) on any major hypervisor, the Brocade Vyatta Controller is interoperable with Brocade MLXe, VDX, ICX, vADX and vRouter product families, as well as popular third-party network infrastructure equipment. As a result, network architects and administrators can operate their multivendor networks holistically on the basis of policy and desired behavior that is specific to their needs. As the network infrastructure evolves to integrate NFV and other emerging technologies, the Brocade Vyatta Controller provides a strategic bridge between existing and next-generation architectures.

An Open Platform for Innovation

Powered by OpenDaylight, the Brocade Vyatta Controller also offers extensive options in how customers develop or source applications. It provides a stable open source development platform for organisations and commercial third-party developers, with complete portability to any OpenDaylight-based controller. With direct access to the controller code and the support of leading developers from Brocade and its peers across the OpenDaylight community, customers can accelerate application and feature development by leveraging the community and independent developers, while retaining full intellectual property rights.

“The momentum behind the OpenDaylight Project is unlike anything else the networking industry has experienced and that is because the customer demand for an open, software-defined platform is louder than ever before,” said Neela Jacques, executive director of the OpenDaylight Project. “Brocade has been among the most active contributors and the Brocade Vyatta Controller is not only a testament of its commitment to the OpenDaylight Project, but to delivering open networking solutions.”

Among the initial applications available from Brocade will be the Path Explorer and Volumetric Traffic Management applications. Designed to provide topology awareness and path optimization, the Path Explorer application will be available concurrently with the Brocade Vyatta Controller. The Volumetric Traffic Management application is planned for early 2015, and will help customers manage volumetric traffic attacks, as well as legitimate “elephant flows” in the data center.