SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 11, 2016) - Big Switch Networks®, the leader in bringing hyperscale networking to data centers worldwide, announced today that its Community Edition Sweepstakes contest is now open for submissions until Friday, September 9th, 2016 at 5pm PT. For more details and to submit an entry please visit: http://bit.ly/2aeZXwR
The company has issued the SDN challenge to the networking community to share the most innovative, and compelling customer use-cases for next generation SDN fabric solutions. Community Edition Sweepstakes applicants may submit a use-case proposal and in return winners of the challenge will receive free physical hardware switches in addition to free software licenses for the Big Cloud Fabric™ and/or Big Monitoring Fabric™ Community Edition products. The winners will be determined through internal voting from the company's panel of engineering judges and the Big Switch management team. Three winners will be selected from the submitted list of proposed use cases.
"Big Switch's Community Edition Sweepstakes is a great opportunity for members of our community to take part in advancing innovation in networking," said Rob Sherwood, Chief Technology Officer, Big Switch Networks. "As a pioneer in SDN, Big Switch has always been a champion of education, knowledge-sharing, and discovery of new use cases for improving network infrastructure- the human capital out there is not limited so we want to hear from those who are seeking to build durable solutions for their data centers with pervasive security and scalability. With this contest, we're effectively arming the community with tools and resources to further their understanding of SDN, and what sorts of benefits can be realized from the technology."
Community Edition is the industry's first freemium offering for open SDN data center networking. The software is a perpetual license of either Big Monitoring Fabric or Big Cloud Fabric that can be downloaded for use in lab and development environments deployed on switch hardware supported by the Community Edition hardware compatibility list (HCL). Community Edition makes it easy for organizations to download software on premise to experience the agility, efficiency, ease of management and dramatic operational efficiencies of SDN fabrics with open networking switches.
Community Edition offers a perpetual license for organizations to get started with SDN:
- Big Monitoring Fabric includes software for one switch and VM controller pair
- Big Cloud Fabric includes software for one leaf pair and VM controller pair
In addition to Community Edition, Big Switch also provides network architects and administrators interested in hands-on experience with next generation SDN technology, the opportunity to do so with BSN Labs. The Labs environment enables instant access to the company's production ready SDN fabric solutions via an online, hands-on testbed environment in the cloud. More than 3,500 active users have logged in to BSN Labs to experience the online labs environment across 10 distinct modules.
The company just released its newest Labs module, Big Monitoring Fabric In-line Mode, which enables users to experience the intuitive UI and drag and drop simplicity of configuring policy-based service chaining. Instead of brittle, expensive and complex service daisy-chaining, BMF Inline enables flexible, simple and powerful integration with leading L4-L7 tools like firewall, SSL decryption, intrusion detection, and web proxy for software-based service chaining based on specific traffic flows shaped by the Big Mon Fabric controller. To learn more about the Inline DMZ security use case, please visit: Big Monitoring Fabric - Inline , or sign up for the new BSN Labs Inline security module here -- labs.bigswitch.com .
ADDITIONAL CONTEST DETAILS Contest Software: Big Cloud Fabric is a true SDN single-point of control, multi-tenant production data center controller and network management system. Big Cloud Fabric has native integration with OpenStack and VMware's ESX orchestration solutions as well as traditional non-virtualized workloads.
With Big Cloud Fabric as a building block, there are many possible use-cases, for example:
- OpenStack scaling and performance
- SDN for high-performance computing (HPC)
- Service chaining for Network Function Virtualization (NFV)
- Big data computations (Hadoop, Spark, etc)
- IP-based hyper-converged storage
Big Monitoring Fabric is a next-generation Network Packet Broker (NPB) that's been designed from the ground up to build a pervasive visibility fabric that addresses the challenges of current NPB-based monitoring solutions. Using an SDN-centric architecture, Big Monitoring Fabric enables scale-out fabric for network-wide monitoring, with a single pane of glass for operational simplicity, and multi-tenancy for multiple IT teams (NetOps, DevOps, SecOps).
With Big Monitoring Fabric as a building block, possible compelling use-cases include
- Pervasive security monitoring
- Scale-out application performance monitoring
- Trigger-based dynamic monitoring rules
- Load-balancing across multiple monitoring tools
- Science DMZ
- Patch Panel Development
Contest Hardware: Both Big Cloud Fabric and Big Monitoring Fabric software products run a variety of 1G, 10G, and 40G data center open networking switches and optics.
Review the Community Edition Datasheet for specific information on the software and required compatible switch hardware.
SUPPORTING MATERIALS Big Switch Labs Community Edition Community Edition Sweepstakes
SUPPORTING QUOTES "We continue to track strong and growing interest in data center SDN and network disaggregation among enterprises," said Brad Casemore, director of research for datacenter networking at IDC. "That said, many enterprises are still relatively unfamiliar with the technologies and are unsure how to proceed. Big Switch's Community Edition Sweepstakes offers organizations an opportunity to showcase and share their network innovations, and it provides the broader networking community an opportunity to learn from the innovation of their peers."
"BSN Labs is a hosted lab environment complete with walk-throughs, scenarios and free rein to manage a simulated network as you please. I'm constantly looking for resources and tools to expand my knowledge base in an industry that is quickly changing. Big Switch has done a commendable job to provide the networking field with hands-on labs showcasing their technology, which is also quite helpful in conveying many of the general SDN concepts, even providing a glimpse of orchestration through OpenStack -- something I personally had no hands-on experience with. Labs is innovative and ideal for those who are looking for resources to keep them apprised of the latest and greatest." -- David Varnum, Network Engineer
ABOUT BIG SWITCH NETWORKS Big Switch Networks is the market leader in bringing hyperscale-inspired data center networking technologies to a broader audience. The company is taking three key hyperscale technologies - OEM/ODM bare metal and open Ethernet switch hardware, sophisticated SDN control software, and core-and-pod data center designs - and leveraging them in fit-for-purpose products designed for use in enterprises, cloud providers, and service providers. The company's Big Monitoring Fabric is a next-generation SDN solution to monitor existing networks, and the flagship Big Cloud Fabric is the industry's most advanced bare metal switching fabric intended for new data center pods such as private cloud, big data, and VDI. The company is backed by Index Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, Silver Lake Partners, Accton, Redpoint Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Intel and Goldman Sachs, among others. For additional information, email info@bigswitch.com , follow @bigswitch , or visit www.bigswitch.com .
Big Switch Networks, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Monitoring Fabric, Switch Light OS, and Switch Light vSwitch are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.
Media & Analyst Contact Kate Lehman kate.lehman@bigswitch.com 707.364.1248
