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Everybody loves Microsoft's open switch software, SONiC
Plus news from F5, Palo Alto and Dell EMC in your networking news capsule
Roundup This week's networking news roundup isn't only “what happened at the Open Compute Project summit?” – there's also news from F5, Palo Alto Networks, and Dell EMC.
Microsoft coordinated a bunch of announcements at the Open Compute Project summit this week, centred around its SONiC open switch software platform.
Microsoft and Mellanox inked a deal that added SONiC to the platforms supported on Mellanox Spectrum switches and ConnectX NICs.
The combination makes it easier to extend non-virtual on-premises networks into the Azure cloud, Mellanox said.
SONiC breaks switch software into multiple, containerised components and targets cloud networking where scale and management are the main considerations.
Microsoft's Yousef Khalid has a detailed discussion of SONiC here.
Mellanox wasn't the only SONiC enthusiast at the OCP Summit this week. Apstra also ran demonstrations of its intent-based operating system, AOS, with the Microsoft offering.
Barefoot Networks is another fan, folding SONiC into a variety of its Tofino-based bare metal switches. The company said SONiC will bring advanced capabilities like data plane telemetry.
Microsoft has contributed SONiC to the Open Compute Project.
F5 gets the Big Blues
F5 this week announced it's integrating its Big IP application layer services into IBM's Cloud Private.
The company explained it's created the Big IP Controller as a component that runs in an IBM Cloud Private container.
Outside the container “is a BIG-IP, providing ingress routing and layer 4–7 services to a series of application pools made up of Kubernetes pods. The Controller continually updates the BIG-IP with the status of these pods. As they are created and destroyed, the BIG-IP is kept apprised and provides advanced application performance and security services for Ingress control”.
This provides orchestration and a high availability control plane between user instances running in different IBM Cloud Private zones, as well as other upper-layer services like firewalling, access control, OAuth, and DDoS protection.
And yes that is "Cloud Private" not "Private Cloud". Cloud Private is Big Blue's environment for on-prem containerised apps.
Palo Alto Networks lays new Traps
Palo Alto Networks has reworked its Traps endpoint so customers can manage it from the cloud.
As well as a cloud-managed version, the company announced its Traps 5.0 offering now supports Linux, and its infrastructure has been redesigned.
Version 5.0 is also better integrated with the company's Application Framework and LoggingService. Application Framework apps can now use Traps as a sensor and enforcement point for other applications delivered through the framework.
Dell EMC edgy about open networking
Dell released the Virtual Edge Platform VEP 4600, a software defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solution based on the Intel Xeon D-2100 processor, designed to connect the enterprise edge to the cloud without “fixed-function” access hardware.
The uCPE (universal customer premise equipment) approach is cheaper, Dell EMC explained. The VEP 4600 can run multiple virtual network functions, allowing multiple physical devices to be consolidated into a single device, and is field-upgradable.
As well as basic CPE functions, users can add VNFs for routing, firewalling, deep packet inspection and so on. Dell EMC is shipping three turnkey versions of the VEP 4600 with pre-validated configurations including software from Silver Peak Systems, VeloCloud Networks, and Versa Networks. ®