Open Network Featured Article

In a world where data is everything, there has to be a better way to capture, manage and use this growing amount of data for the advancement of your organization. Data is business intelligence and it allows you to know more about your customers, your market and your opportunities. To do so, you need data center solutions that embrace open networking and can scale accordingly.

Pica8 is one company that continues to demonstrate its leadership in the open networking and data center space. Now, the company has added functionality to its PicOS network operation system with Table Type Patterns (TTP). This new functionality is designed to overcome limitations in OpenFlow scaling. This piece in Mission Critical Magazine gives us insight into how powerful this addition is for those seeking support in the data center space.

The addition of TTP allows PicOS to scale to 2 million flows with Cavium’s XPliant switch ASIC, as well as 256,000 flows with Broadcom’s (News - Alert) StrataXGS Tomahawk switch ASIC. What does this mean for your organization? It means you finally gain access to the tools you need for very large data center build-outs. Given that typical TCAM flow capacity typically stays between 1,000 and 2,000 flows, Pica8’s latest move allows production networks to scale 1,000 times more.

Open networking will gain tremendous capabilities with Pica8’s TPP. An increasing number of organizations are deploying OpenFlow rules along with traditional Layer-2 / Layer-3 networks using Pica8’s CrossFlow technology. The ultimate goal is to provide greater agility and granular control over policies concerning traffic engineering. TPP capabilities can be applied across a number of data center applications, such as disaster recovery, hybrid cloud and even network monitoring.

Using the SDN controller, TPP defines how tables are configured within the switch through the OpenFlow switch protocol. And given the growing demand for data within organizations throughout nearly every industry, this new capability from Pica8 couldn’t have come at a better time. Companies will gain the ability to maximize available capacity, enable future innovation in hardware switches, better accommodate heterogeneity of existing hardware switches and enable automated communication between application and controller developers and switch vendors.

All of this is good news for the organization that needs to better scale to meet their data demands. It also allows for greater flexibility when integrating with key solutions and vendors. As data continues to play a bigger role in the organization, how it’s managed within open networking is of key importance. Thanks to Pica8, there’s now a better solution to scale according to today’s demands.