SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 18 — Big Switch Networks, the company bringing hyperscale networking to data centers worldwide, announced it is enabling the SCinet NOC team by providing a monitoring fabric for Supercomputing ’14 (SC14) in collaboration with Dell Open Networking and Garland Technology. In addition to providing a scale-out network monitoring capability and simplified operations for the SCinet security team, the open networking/SDN solution will be demonstrated to SC14 attendees as part of the event.

Created each year for SC, SCinet brings to life a high-capacity network that supports the revolutionary applications and experiments that are a hallmark of the SC Conference. This is one of the largest publicly demonstrated production deployments of a network monitoring fabric in the industry. The scale is particularly notable as SCinet itself is known to be one of the industry’s most demanding networks, supporting the rapid build-out of numerous supercomputing demonstrations live at the show. SCinet will link the convention center to research and commercial networks around the world.

Demos of the joint solution showing production use are available at SC14’s SCinet Network Operations Center (NOC) booth in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, New Orleans, LA from November 16 to 21.

Details of the deployment:

• Network traffic from widely dispersed topology consisting of 32 classrooms and multiple ISP connection points will be replicated using Garland Technology optical TAPs.
• A scale-out monitoring fabric design consisting of Dell Open Networking Ethernet switches running Big Switch’s Switch Light OS will be performing advanced monitoring and analytics functions while delivering the relevant network traffic to a pool of security, traffic analysis and performance management tools.
• The Big Switch Big Tap Controller will be providing a single pane of glass visibility for various SC14 NOC administrators across this scale-out monitoring fabric design.

“The visibility requirements of a supercomputing network mandate a highly distributed, flexible fabric design that scales up without adding layers of operational complexity. It is great to see Big Tap, a next-generation network packet broker, help monitor and debug all aspects of the SC network,” commented Rob Sherwood, Big Switch Networks, CTO.

This joint solution comes on the heels of this month’s earlier announcement that Big Switch and Dell are now shipping their first SDN/open networking fabric solution. This partnership brings together hardware, software and services that facilitate Dell to bring key hyperscale networking technologies — SDN software and open networking hardware — to data centers worldwide.

“The Supercomputing Conference has traditionally been home to cutting-edge developments in high-performance networking,” commented Carrie Gates, SCinet Security Team, Co-Team Lead. “Dell Open Networking switches, together with Big Tap controller software, enable us to achieve greater visibility into our network, along with fine-grained control over how we distribute traffic across our analytics tools.”

“We’re demonstrating how hardware — like network TAPs — is the foundation for monitoring a production network,” said Chris Bihary, Garland Technology, CEO. “There’s a big push right now for complete network access. Our collaboration with Dell and Big Switch Networks is a showcase of how data visibility via TAPs is the foundation of a network monitoring fabric solution. Come see how it works and how network access powers other tools on the NOC network.”

“SCinet serves as the platform to demonstrate the advanced computing resources by supporting a wide variety of bandwidth-driven applications including supercomputing and cloud computing,” added Jeff Boote, SCinet Security Team, Co-Team Lead. “Monitoring and securing this network at scale is a key priority. The software defined networking (SDN) design of Big Tap allows us to greatly expand visibility in our production network by substantially increasing port density for sensors.”

About Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Networks is the market leader in bringing hyperscale data center networking technologies to a broader audience. The company is taking three key hyperscale technologies — open Ethernet switch hardware, sophisticated SDN control software, and core-and-pod data center designs — and leveraging them in fit-for-purpose products designed for use in enterprises, cloud providers, and service providers. The company’s Big Tap Monitoring Fabric is an entry level solution to monitor existing networks, and the flagship Big Cloud Fabric is the industry’s most advanced bare metal switching fabric intended for new data center pods such as private cloud, big data, and VDI. For additional information, email [email protected], follow @bigswitch, or visit www.bigswitch.com.

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Source: Big Switch Networks