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Avaya is Latest Company to 'Brite Box' Its NOS

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Avaya is Latest Company to 'Brite Box' Its NOS

 
June 21, 2016

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  By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

Today, more and more companies are embracing the open networking concept. Dell (News - Alert), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper Networks are three of the companies responding to enterprises and service providers who want greater agility, programmability and affordability in their networking environments. The latest companies to take this step is network solutions provider Avaya (News - Alert), which recently announced that it’s making its network operating system (NOS) available on third-party industry-standard hardware.


What this means is that Avaya’s network OS can now be deployed to rival vendor’s hardware as part of branded ‘white box’ switching move. The company is introducing a version of its NOS that will be able to run on standard systems. The move is actually phase one of a larger rollout of a larger plan for a networking disaggregation model that will benefit high-density data centers that require platforms such as 64-port 40 Gigabit Ethernet or 32-port 100GbE. Avaya is working on the model and building out an ecosystem of partners through its membership in the Facebook-led Open Compute Project (OCP (News - Alert)), according to eWeek’s Jeffrey Burt.

But what, precisely, does “industry standard hardware for specialized solutions providers” mean? These providers include managed service providers, cloud service providers, systems integrators, and data center hosting companies. Essentially, Avaya is NOT proposing white box switching, but rather what has been called by Gartner (News - Alert) “brite-box switching,” according to Avaya’s Randy Cross, the company’s director of data center virtualization and strategy.

“White box switching refers to the ability to use generic, off-the-shelf switching and routing hardware, in the forwarding plane of a software-defined network. White box switches are really just that—blank standard hardware,” wrote Cross. “Brite-box switching is shorthand for branded white-box switching. The key tenants of a brite-box switch are disaggregation (hardware and software/OS can be decoupled), reduced capital cost (i.e., white-box economics), commercial software (versus roll your own), and the option to receive service/support from a single supplier.”

While white-box networking has a number of upsides, it puts a lot of the onus of integrating third-party operating systems onto bare-metal boxes on the enterprises themselves, which may not have the expertise or capital to do so.

“The networking vendors generally bring the value of an established supply chain, strong professional services, and a mature support organization,” wrote Cross. “They sell standard hardware with their own brand affixed at a lower markup than usual and pre-loaded with your choice of NOS. They also offer experienced professional services to help integrate these new platforms into your environment. Finally, they offer support on the hardware, as it does carry their brand, however, software support is still the domain of the NOS vendor.”

Avaya is offering a network OS that includes network management capabilities that has been used for years and has more than 100,000 test scenarios, Cross wrote. It also brings virtualization features, network orchestration and support.

"We've decoupled our mature, widely proven Network Operating System software from our branded hardware and created an opportunity for specialty solutions providers to take advantage of the white box consumption model without disrupting their operational environment," wrote Cross. “The whole experience should sound somewhat familiar, as it closely resembles buying branded switches today. That's the point. Disaggregation should be a welcome change in the industry.”




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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