On today’s episode of the Weekly Show we talk with Big Switch Networks. Rob Sherwood, Big Switch CTO, joins us to discuss the latest capabilities in Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric.

Big Monitoring Fabric combines switches and a controller to monitor your production network. Like a packet broker, Monitoring Fabric gets information from span and TAP ports and steers that traffic to monitoring tools from Big Switch partners, such as FireEye and Riverbed.

Big Monitoring Fabric 5.5 includes a new software services appliance to provide additional features, including packet deduplication, packet slicing, regex patterning, and more. The appliance is an x86 server, and it can process 4x10Gbps of traffic at line rate. It s managed via the controller. Other new features include an enhanced sFlow collector.

Big Cloud Fabric combines white box switches with a controller to create a cloud-ready data center. The latest version, 3.5, includes new features including a self-service portal in VMware vCenter to enable VMware admins to take actions such as attaching a virtual machine to a VLAN, setting ACLs or QoS parameters, and other functions.

And if that idea frightens you, the Big Switch controller can set restrictions on what vCenter admins can do.

Big Switch has also announced Community Editions of Big Cloud and Big Monitoring Fabrics, which are free instances that let you download and try the software for yourself. The Community Editions are limited to one switch; you have to buy a white box to run the software, but Big Switch is offering discounts. Big Switch has a hardware compatibility list of white box providers.

Big Monitoring Fabric 5.5 Innovations

Intel x86 based Service Nodes: Pervasive, on-demand network visibility that is economical to deploy and operate. Intel DPDK based Advanced Service nodes for DPI-like functionality, for advanced packet functions.

100G Switch HW: Support for high-performance 32x100GbE switches from Dell (Z9100-ON) and Accton (AS7712-32X); also operates in 10GbE/40GbE modes and is future proof for 25GbE/50GbE

Advanced Fabric Analytics: sFlow Collector, historical time series, DHCP / DNS / ICMP trackers for enhanced monitoring

Security Service Chain (Inline Mode) Enhancements: Driven by cybersecurity needs, the inline mode simplifies deployment and change management of multiple DMZ/Extranet security tools. Enhancements include flexible policy-based service chaining, custom messages for tool health and sub-second health checks.

Big Cloud Fabric 3.5 Innovations

Logical vPods: Fundamental to our product architecture is the notion of disaggregating netframes — enabling faster innovation and eliminating vendor lock-ins. With BCF vPods we are bringing the same choice at the data center orchestration layer.  A single BCF Pod can now support multiple, isolated vPods, where each vPod can be associated with a different vSphere or OpenStack controller.  For lab setups, dev and test deployments, or even production Pods, the level of agility, choice and flexibility this provides is unprecedented.  Click to view a short demo video of the Multi-Orchestration Support with Single BCF.

Enhanced Visibility & Automation for VMware vSphere: VMware vCenter 6.0 GUI Plugin that provides visibility and L2/L3 fabric configuration to vCenter admin upon authorization by network admin

vRealize Log Insight Content Pack: Provides cloud admin Big Cloud Fabric visibility and analytics

OpenStack: Certification with Red Hat OpenStack Platform 7

Security: Cryptographically secure communication between BCF Controller and BCF fabric switches

Links:

To learn more, check out the latest presentations, videos and demos:

Winter 2016 Launch Webinar: View Now

Big Switch Labs: Click to Signup

ACG Research White Paper: Economic Benefits of Open SDN Fabrics

Doyle Research White Paper: Enabling Pervasive Security

Big Monitoring Fabric Latest Videos & Demos

BMF 5.5 Overview NFD 11: View Now

BMF 5.5 Demo NFD 11: View Now

BMF Inline Overview NFD 11: View Now

BMF Inline / Service Chain Demo NFD 11: View Now

Packet Slicing Service Node: View Demo

Packet Deduplication Service Node: View Demo

Big Cloud Fabric Latest Videos & Demos

BCF 3.5 Overview NFD 11: View Now

Multi-Orchestration Support with vPods: View Demo

BCF Plugin for vSphere 6.0: View Demo

BCF Plugin for VMware vRealize Log Insight: View Demo

Container Networking with BCF: View Demo

BCF Unified P+V Fabric Overview: View Demo

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