Open Network Featured Article

Open networking lately has seen some substantial new advances, especially after recent news that ON (News - Alert).Lab and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) were pushing toward a merger. Now, there's a further advance from Luxar Tech, which brings a first-of-its-kind tool to the fore, in the form of a 100G network packet broker (NPB) that uses OpenFlow as a base.

The new NPB line from Luxar Tech allows for the best in access and visibility, allowing the mysteries of network traffic to become clearer, and in the process, help spot any potential problems that may be taken place. It also helps provide some of the necessary clarity required to get more out of a variety of network tools, ranging from acceleration to network monitoring to even security, which improves the network's performance on several fronts.

Those putting Luxar NPBs to work will get further advantage, especially if considering an expansion into software-defined networking (SDN) operations. The new NPBs are SDN-ready, reports note, and will readily become a part of the larger Luxar visibility platform. There's even something of a modular nature to these, as users can start out by adding a comparatively small quantity before stepping up into larger deployments. A few NPBs can go in first, and then using another system from Luxar—the white box switch fabric known as LuxeFabric—the system can be ramped up appropriately.

It's also recently been seen working with Rohde & Schwarz (News - Alert) to bring in new traffic analytics tools, which can further improve network operations. Based on word from Luxar vice president of networking produces Henry Fung, customers are not only using this infrastructure to handle network traffic issues during business hours, but after hours, the same system can be used to run big data computation processes. The company has also scaled better than 1,000 endpoints so far, which is a significant accomplishment.

What Luxar Tech seems to have done here is provide a valuable new approach to network operations, providing better visibility into network traffic that helps keep things running as smoothly as possible in a normal work day. This is always a welcome development, but there are plenty of other products that can promise similar outcomes, which could make it difficult for Luxar to make headway in the open networking market. The good news here is that Luxar has something of an extra ace in the hole, especially with reports that its products are already being used to handle some of the analysis functions in big data projects.

Luxar has quite a bit to offer, and it will need all it can muster in the face of a market that's increasingly full of open networking capability. Its versatility, though, could be its saving grace.