Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Networks
Private
Industry Technology
Founded 2010
Headquarters Santa Clara, California, United States
Key people
 CEO: Douglas Murray;[1] Founder: Kyle Forster; CFO: Seamus Hennessy
Products Big Monitoring Fabric; Big Cloud Fabric
Number of employees
 200-500[2]
Website www.bigswitch.com

Big Switch Networks is a cloud and data center networking company. The company was founded by Kyle Forster and Guido Appenzeller in 2010 and has roots in the original Stanford research team that invented software defined networking (SDN).[3] Douglas Murray, a former Juniper Networks and Sun Microsystems executive, joined the company as CEO in 2013 as the company went through a significant pivot following VMware's acquisition of Nicira.[4]

Big Switch has two products: Big Monitoring Fabric, a network packet broker (NPB) fabric, which enables security and monitoring of data center and cloud traffic as well as provide capacity and security insights to that traffic by leveraging Big Monitoring Analytics Node and Recorder Node. Big Cloud Fabric is a leaf-spine data center switching fabric for VMware SDDC, Nutanix, Openstack and container use cases. Big Switch software runs on open Ethernet networking switches from Accton Edgecore, Dell EMC, and HPE, and leverage centralized SDN controller software for fabric-wide control and management.

Investors in the company include: Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, SilverLake, MSD Capital, Goldman Sachs, and Intel Capital.[5] As of July 2017, the company has raised over $120M in funding.[6]

Company

In 2013 the company released its first commercial product, Big Monitoring Fabric and in 2014 the company released Big Cloud Fabric. Customers include: Verizon,[7] Intuit,[8] Clemson,[9] U2 Cloud,.[10] Big Switch is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA.

Key technologies

Switch Light OS: An operating system for open network Ethernet switches based on Open Network Linux (ONL), an open source effort within the Open Compute Project.

Switch Light vSwitch: A user space software module for KVM-based virtual switches that adds enhanced functionality and improved performance on top of the Open vSwitch kernel.

Products

Big Monitoring Fabric: Big Monitoring Fabric is a visibility and security monitoring solution. It uses high-performance, open Ethernet switches and a controller-based SDN architecture to enable network-wide monitoring and inline tool chaining in the DMZ. It also has a DPDK-based Service Node appliance that connects to the Big Monitoring Fabric as a service to provide advanced network packet broker functions such as packet de-duplication, packet slicing, regular matching, and NetFlow generation. Big Monitoring Fabric also includes Analytics Node and Recorder Node for rich network visibility.

Big Cloud Fabric: Big Cloud Fabric is an SDN controller-based data center switching fabric. It supports all workloads (physical, virtual machine, and container) and choice of orchestration software (VMware, OpenStack). It provides L2 switching, L3 routing, and L4-7 service insertion and chaining. The scalable fabric is fully resilient, with no single point of failure, and supports headless mode operations. Big Cloud Fabric is available in two editions:

P Fabric — Leaf-spine physical Clos fabric controlled via SDN Controller

P+V Fabric — Leaf-spine physical Clos fabric plus virtual switches controlled by SDN Controller

Open source projects

Big Switch sponsors and participates in the following open source projects:

  • Open Network Linux, a base Linux environment available for Open Compute Project switching platforms[11]
  • Big Switch Networks is a founding member of ONIE (Open Network Install Environment), which was contributed to Open Compute Project[12]

References

In-line references

  1. ↑ Big Switch Networks Team
  2. ↑ Big Switch LinkedIn Profile
  3. ↑ Siegel, Robert (2016). "Big Switch Networks". Stanford Graduate School of Business: Case Studies. Retrieved 2017-01-04.
  4. ↑ "Big Switch Networks Names Douglas Murray as New CEO". finance.yahoo.com. 2013-11-05. Retrieved 2017-01-04.
  5. ↑ "Investors". Big Switch Networks, Inc. Retrieved 2017-01-04.
  6. ↑ "Big Switch Networks Closes $30.7M in Funding".
  7. ↑ "Verizon launches industry-leading large OpenStack NFV deployment". www.verizon.com. Retrieved 2017-01-04.
  8. ↑ Dix, John. "When Intuit's network gets taxed, it turns to Riverbed performance management tools". Network World. Retrieved 2017-01-04.
  9. ↑ "Collaborative Past, Collaborative Future for Clemson & BSN". SDxCentral. 2015-08-06. Retrieved 2017-01-04.
  10. ↑ "Switch software plays bigger role in data center networks". SearchNetworking. Retrieved 2017-01-04.
  11. ↑ "Networking/SpecsAndDesigns - OpenCompute". www.opencompute.org. Retrieved 2017-06-26.
  12. ↑ "ONIE | Open Network Install Environment". onie.org. Retrieved 2017-06-27.

General references

  • Hardy, Quentin (2012-12-06). "Planning His Legacy, Cisco Chief Maps an Expansion". NY Times Bits. Retrieved 2013-05-20.
  • Higginbotham, Stacey (2012-01-11). "Big Switch open-sources Floodlight, an OpenFlow controller". GigaOM. Retrieved 2013-05-20.
  • Dix, John (2012-11-19). "Big Switch arrives". Network World. Retrieved 2013-05-22.
  • Bort, Julie (2013-05-06). "Cisco Just Lost A Key Engineer To This Big-Threat Startup". Business Insider. Retrieved 2013-05-22.
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