SANTA CLARA, Calif., July 18, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Big Switch Networks, the Cloud-First Networking Company, today introduced its Cloud-First Networking (CFN) portfolio, encompassing new products and features for hybrid IT. Big Switch’s CFN portfolio addresses hybrid cloud networking design challenges, by bringing the best of public cloud networking on-premises, in contrast to hardware-centric vendors’ approaches that start with adapting legacy on-premises products for use in public clouds. The company is the first to launch key cloud networking features on-prem, with a portfolio that builds from there with corresponding in-cloud products and culminates in a multi-cloud management system.

“Since the company’s inception, our focus has been on cloud principles. With our Cloud-First Networking innovations, we have partnered with our customers to build solutions that make the network a first class citizen in a multi cloud world,” said Douglas Murray, CEO, Big Switch Networks. “Organizations around the globe face the same networking challenges when it comes to hybrid cloud, and with CFN we are able to help organizations deploy applications more seamlessly and more efficiently by eliminating the network roadblock.”

The company’s current on-prem products, Big Cloud Fabric - Enterprise Cloud (BCF-EC) and Big Monitoring Fabric - Enterprise Cloud (BMF-EC), are the industry’s first solutions offering key public cloud networking and monitoring features to on-prem workloads shipping in the next software release.

Building on these, Big Switch is announcing two new public cloud products, Big Cloud Fabric - Public Cloud (BCF-PC) and Big Monitoring Fabric - Public Cloud (BMF-PC) for corresponding in-cloud deployments.

Finally, the company is introducing Multi-Cloud Director, a system for consistent hybrid design across on-prem sites, across clouds and across on-prem/in-cloud combinations of networking and monitoring fabrics. 

Specifically, CFN starts with Enterprise VPCs, an on-prem version of the key feature of public cloud networks implemented by Amazon (VPCs), Azure (vNets) and Google Cloud Platform (VPCs). VPCs bring as-a-Service operations to networking in-cloud and now on-prem. With VPCs everywhere, coupled with automation everywhere and flow-analytics everywhere, CFN is eliminating the on-prem / in-cloud networking inconsistencies that have been a key impediment to seamless hybrid cloud adoption.

IT organizations can (1) leverage Enterprise VPCs to construct enterprise cloud networks that deliver public cloud benefits of as-a-Service operations, service velocity and flow-level visibility and (2) simultaneously adopt any public cloud, including Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, for additional capacity, application elasticity and/or cost optimization without having to manage multiple  architecture teams, multiple operations teams and multiple designs.

“An architect at one of our customers made a passing comment -- ‘I chose Big Switch because it was the closest we could get to Amazon networking on-premises’ -- and it went viral.  He kicked off our journey to Cloud-First Networking,” said Kyle Forster, Big Switch Founder. “It just clicked… this is what we have to do. It is an exciting time to be in networking.”

Cloud-First Networking Portfolio The extensive CFN product portfolio for hybrid clouds delivers multiple benefits to IT organizations. First, it provides as-a-Service operations with VPCs on-prem and in any public cloud. Second, application placement is no longer constrained by networking or compliance, but instead is based on application’s needs such as latency, bandwidth, data locality or placement cost. Third, IT network operations silos across on-prem and public cloud are converged into a single hybrid cloud networking team, delivering consistent governance, OpEx efficiency and operational autonomy for AppDev teams. CFN breaks the traditional networking-as-a-trouble-ticket paradigm by making networks invisible, eliminating the need for “shadow IT” and accelerating IT’s adoption of hybrid clouds. Fourth, CFN enables IT to deploy any workload on any cloud: VMware, Nutanix, Red Hat, HCI, Kubernetes/Docker container or OpenStack workloads in on-prem enterprise cloud, or Windows/Linux app in AWS or Azure public cloud. Finally, with VPC-level flow analytics, IT can ensure consistent visibility and security of applications and network traffic in any cloud.

The features and products announced today include:

New Features Big Cloud Fabric-Enterprise Cloud (BCF-EC) with VPC Intelligence

  • Intelligent VPC brings VPC style logical networking, providing consistent experience as public cloud, on-prem
  • VPC Automation for any workload orchestrator (VMware, Nutanix, Red Hat, HCI, Kubernetes/Docker containers, OpenStack)
  • Enables consistent on-prem networking for cloud-native applications, including those leveraging containers, for rapid migration to public cloud.

Big Monitoring Fabric-Enterprise Cloud (BMF-EC) with VPC Intelligence

  • VPC-style Flow Analytics using BMF-EC Analytics and Service Nodes that provide an AWS FlowLog-inspired analytics stack for generating, storing and visualizing ubiquitous flow data on-prem
  • Automated monitoring of any workload, including cloud-native workloads
  • Flow-level monitoring and analytics for all network and application traffic, and one-click traffic recording capability, together enabling Network Time Machine for on-demand capture and replay.

New Products Multi-Cloud Director (MCD) As IT organizations scale-out BMF or BCF deployments, across multiple enterprise clouds and/or public cloud(s), they require single console for management of common administration, compliance and visibility tasks. The MCD federates data from all BCF and BMF deployments, with a centralized database, centralized GUI, and centralized search intelligence. Different teams across the organization can access the data via the role-based access control (RBAC) interface.

Multi-Cloud Director offers global management of the following:

  • Global configuration settings for any set of controller instances
  • Controller, VPC, switch and end-point Inventory
  • Geographic placement visibility
  • Compliance reporting
  • Centralized Dashboard and Alerting
  • Integration with BMF and BCF

Big Cloud Fabric-Public Cloud (BCF-PC) VPCs have become the de facto approach for deploying multi-tenant networks in public clouds.  Lack of consistency in VPC management and visibility has caused mainstream organizations to slow-roll their adoption of public cloud. Also, VPC sprawl and the ever-increasing need for VPCs to interacts amongst each other and with on-prem assets, are leading to complex architectures consisting of transit VPCs and App VPCs deployed with hub-and-spoke connections.

With BCF-PC, Big Switch is enabling IT organizations to bring full governance to any VPC in any cloud, including configuration, visibility/troubleshooting and delegated management. With BCF-PC, organizations can leverage the same user experience, tenant pools, and compliance checks via a consistent approach to managing VPCs, whether in its on-prem enterprise cloud or within a public cloud.

BCF-PC provides the following capabilities:

  • Discovery and Visibility: VPCs already configured within an AWS user account, including inventory, usage and configuration data to perform compliance checks.
  • VPC Connectivity and Latency Checks : Via BCF-PC network teams can check connectivity between AWS application instances, including latency measurements and communication path within or across VPCs
  • Configuration of Application and Transit VPCs : Network teams are able to control the flow of communications between different tenant organizations, and delegate VPC administration fully or partially to application owners. 
  • Security Policy Management:   Management of App VPC Security Groups to control East/West traffic, and/or place access control policies for North-South traffic flowing through transit VPCs
  • Centralized Management: Integrated with Big Switch’s Multi-Cloud Director for single-consol hybrid cloud management

Big Monitoring Fabric-Public Cloud (BMF-PC) For many mainstream applications to move to public cloud, IT organizations need sophisticated monitoring of VPC traffic, including deep-packet and flow monitoring, similar to that provided by on-prem visibility fabrics such as BMF-EC. Today, organizations are challenged because public cloud providers do not offer these capabilities.

BMF-PC solves this issue, with the creation of a VPC-based network packet broker (NPB) in any public cloud. Packets are replicated and forwarded to the “monitoring VPC,” from any workload, and/or VPC. Any cloud-based tools can be connected to BMF-PC for deeper security and application performance monitoring.

BMF-PC offers the following capabilities:

  • Centralized packet- and flow-based monitoring of all VPCs
  • All visibility-related traffic is kept local for security purposes and cost savings
  • All monitoring tools are centralized and tagged within the dedicated VPC for ease of configuration
  • Access and use is controlled by multiple IT teams, based upon access rights and monitoring policies, thus reducing tool sprawl
  • Integrated with Big Switch’s Multi-Cloud Director for centralized hybrid cloud management

Product Availability

  • Enterprise Cloud VPCs ° BMF-EC with flow and packet visibility is generally available (GA) today ° BCF-EC with VPC intelligence will be available for beta in Q3, 2018
  • BMF-PC for AWS will be in GA Q3, 2018
  • BCF-PC for AWS will be available for beta in Q4, 2018
  • Multi-cloud Director will be generally available in Q4, 2018

Learn More

  • Join us for Networking Field Day 18, Weds. July 18th at 4pm PDT -- you can view the livestream via: °  http://TechFieldDay.com °  http://facebook.com/TechFieldDay/  
  • Join us for the webinar, “Our Next BIG Announcement: Introducing Cloud-First Networking” ° Americas/EMEA: Thurs, July 19th at 10am PDT/4pm BST ° APAC: Thurs., July 20th at 9am JST/10am AEST

Supporting Quotes “At Dell EMC, we believe the network provides the foundation for IT transformation, and our Open Networking strategy is the key for customer choice and operational simplicity," said Tom Burns, senior vice president and general manager, Dell EMC Networking and Solutions. "Together, the Big Switch Cloud-First Networking and Dell EMC portfolios deliver consistent networking principles and governance policies so IT organizations can more seamlessly and easily bridge the gap that exists today with hybrid cloud."

"In our data center networks, it is critical for us to provide developers with the same experience in the cloud as they have on-premises. With different features and functions between cloud providers, it is impractical to have full end-to-end visibility, which ultimately leads to slowdowns around troubleshooting and service delivery. To ensure consistency in our designs, having a single place to see all of our VPCs is vital regardless of their location on-prem or in the cloud. As application needs and workloads shift, the need for visibility and transparency is essential to bridging the gap between traditional and future IT operations." -- Neil Hanlon, DevOps Engineer,  KAYAK

“Our infrastructure will span on-prem and multiple clouds, and a consistent means to monitor and control networks across these environments is critical. We do not want to run completely different operational and network analytics tooling for each platform. Unfortunately, by default this is the case, with each platform’s native capabilities taking different approaches. While competition is good and each platform has its high points, it is an operational nightmare. I want consistency in the basics both on-prem and across clouds: network analytics, packet capture, troubleshooting tools, etc. As we design for hybrid workloads and a multi-cloud future, we are looking for tools that can provide cross-platform transparency and features without undermining the unique value-add capabilities of each platform.” -- Director, Digital Services, Fortune 500 Manufacturer

“Having just as nimble networking on- and off-premises is a must for enterprises considering wholescale hybrid cloud deployments.  Complete feature parity is needed between on- and off-premises environments – features like virtual private cloud, micro-segmentation, network analytics, and other infrastructure-as-code capabilities that provide fully templated and orchestrated network services throughout the whole lifecycle of an application. That kind of fluidity is the missing technical link in enterprise cloud deployments today, and the one that leads to truly emergent I.T. operations – true NetDevOps capabilities, not just concepts still waiting to be realized.” -- IT Architect, Fortune 100 Aerospace organization

“Since its inception Big Switch has pioneered the simplification of networks for private cloud environments. It has simplified operations by automating key operational tasks, and seamlessly integrating its offerings into the industry’s most prominent cloud management platforms.  By expanding its framework and embracing the VPC and multi-cloud director paradigms at the heart of its Cloud-First portfolio for enabling hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, Big Switch is again proving the simplicity, versatility and overall efficiency of its solutions by integrating its Big Cloud Fabric and Big Monitoring solutions into the environments used by the public cloud providers its customers want to work with.” -- Paul Parker-Johnson, Practice Lead, Cloud + Virtual System Infrastructures, ACG Research

Supporting Material Multi-Cloud Director:

Big Cloud Fabric-Public Cloud:

Big Monitoring Fabric-Public Cloud:

Big Cloud Fabric-Enterprise Cloud:

Big Monitoring Fabric-Enterprise Cloud:

About Big Switch Networks Big Switch Networks is the Cloud-First Networking company, bringing public cloud-style networking and hybrid cloud consistency to organizations around the world. The company provides data center switching, monitoring, visibility and security solutions for on-premises enterprise cloud, public cloud and Multi-cloud environments that enable companies of all sizes to dramatically increase operational efficiency, increase business agility, and reduce networking costs. Big Switch was founded in 2010, with roots in the original Stanford research team that invented software-defined networking. Big Switch has strategic partnerships with Dell EMC, HPE and Edgecore, delivering innovative software on industry-standard open networking hardware. Since its founding the company has been an active member and contributor to multiple open source communities. Big Switch Networks is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, with a dedicated presence across more than 25 countries. The company is funded from leading venture capital firms, including: Dell Technologies Capital, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, MSD Capital, Morgenthaler Ventures, Redpoint and Silverlake Waterman.

For additional information: visit us www.bigswitch.com , reach us info@bigswitch.com or follow us on Twitter @bigswitch , LinkedIn and YouTube .

Copyright 2018 Big Switch Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Big Switch Networks, the Big Switch logo, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Mon, Big Monitoring Fabric, BMF, BigSecure, Big Switch Labs, Big Tap, BSN, Switch Light, ONL Certified, and ONL Certified Gold, ONLX are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners. Big Switch Networks assumes no responsibility for any inaccuracies in this document. Big Switch Networks reserves the right to change, modify, transfer or otherwise revise this publication without notice.

Media & Analyst contact: Kate Lehman media@bigswitch.com