infoTECH Feature

April 17, 2012

NEC Launches OpenFlow 2.0 Suite to Ease Cloud, Virtualization Deployments

As today’s enterprises gain increased awareness of software defined networking, NEC (News - Alert) Corporation of America (NEC) has revealed its next generation OpenFlow platform, which is called ProgrammableFlow (PFC) 2.0 Product Suite.

Building on its OpenFlow 1.0 standard to provide enhanced control of network resources, company officials said the latest version gives organizations the ability to design, deploy, monitor and manage secure, multitenant networks from a single point of control.

This release of the ProgrammableFlow 2.0 extends NEC’s lead in software defined networking,” said Don Clark, director of Business Development, IT Platform Technologies, at NEC. “Deployed as data center fabric or as a virtualization layer for network services, ProgrammableFlow version 2.0’s automation and ease of use allows customers to quickly deploy and gain the benefits of a software defined network.”

In addition to providing better control of the network, PFC also allows businesses to maintain interoperability with other OpenFlow compliant equipment. Based on NEC’s multitenant network virtualization technology, organizations can programmatically manage the way traffic flows across the network, aimed to optimize use of existing network resources and the appliances, servers, and storage connecting to the network, which ultimately can lead to service agility and improved staff productivity.

Updates to ProgrammableFlow 2.0 include the following features:

Policy Based Multipath Routing – The physical path traffic takes across the network can be distributed across equal cost links and by path policy. The path policy can be customized dynamically based on traffic type, providing policy based traffic steering.

Point and Click Network Deployment –Virtual networks can be created and deployed from a single user interface. Leveraging NEC’s Virtual Tenant Network (VTN) technology, the Version 2.0 of the ProgrammableFlow Controller interface allows operators to create/delete virtual networks, manage virtual network topology setting, and configuration.

Network Service/Appliance Failover – ProgrammableFlow continuously monitors the status of network services and can automatically redirect traffic to services in the case the primary service is no longer reachable.

Bandwidth Monitor – With the bandwidth monitor function, statistical information can be periodically obtained from OpenFlow switches. The number of bytes received from the physical port of the switches can be collected.

More organizations are realizing that a programmable network can alleviate the complexities associated with virtualization and the cloud, according to Cindy Borovick, IDC (News - Alert) program vice president, Enterprise and Datacenter Networks.

“A programmable network can help customers solve the complexity challenge in today's networks- particularly for customers with highly virtualized environments, or moving to private clouds,” Borovick said.

Company officials said OpenFlow-based networks eliminate most of the configuration management in traditional networks, while the ProgrammableFlow Controller 2.0 enables new capabilities that ease the administration of VLANs, subnets and ACLs.

Using the OpenFlow protocol 1.0 standard, the PF6800 2.0 transforms traditional network monitoring and management by integrating real time monitoring with remediation.  In addition, NEC’s vFilter and vRedirect technology allows the development of customized network monitoring, policy management and service resiliency in real time.






Edited by Jennifer Russell
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