HPE to resell Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric and Big Monitoring Fabric
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) recently announced it will resell Big Switch Network’s Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) and Big Monitoring Fabric (Big Mon) with its Altoline Switch Products as part of a recent partnership with the software-defined networking (SDN) company.
Purpose of partnership
By joining forces with Big Switch, HPE can provide clients better monitoring tools for network traffic than its current kit offers. By the same token, the venture can potentially boost Big Switch’s reputation with a partner as big as HPE.
Becoming an Altoline partner also signals HPE is up to pace with other companies running Big Switch on their networking kits including Dell and Accton Edgecore Networks. In addition, the partnership allows the companies to cast a wider net in the budding SDN market against competitors like Cisco and Juniper Networks. According to research by IDC, the SDN market is projected to increase from $225 million in 2015 to $1.19 billion by the end of 2017.
Big Mon and BCF
BCF is a network packet broker (NPB) that enables service providers to deploy SDN. Big Mon is a modern network visibility fabric that enables IT departments to safeguard their networks from security breaches. Big Switch claims its fabric-based solutions provide a superior platform to the traditional switch-based model that SDN was founded on.
“We continue to see customers vote for choice, as witnessed by the rise in demand for open networking solutions. We’re pleased to extend our open networking ecosystem with HPE,” said Susheel Chitre, vice president of business development at Big Switch Networks.
“HPE and Big Switch will provide customers with the best solutions for their specific needs, including SDN-based data center fabric optimized for VMware workloads, scalable, high performance OpenStack NFV deployments, next-generation out-of-band network monitoring, and a scalable SDN service-chaining fabric for DMZ security.”
Big Switch says Big Mon can provide scale-out data center monitoring at potentially 50% lower the cost than traditional NPBs. Moreover, the company says BCF supports physical and virtual workloads, and has built-in integration for VMware software-defined data centers (SDDCs). Big Mon and BCF will be available on three models of HPE’s open networking switches, including the Altoline 6960, 6941 and 6921 switches.
Other partnerships
Big Switch landed a comparable partnership with Dell, then Dell EMC, over three years ago. Dell agreed to resell Big Switch Big Tap application and the Switch Light Operating System running on its Open Networking switches, including the S4810 and S6000 series. In addition, HPE announced last November it would extend its partnership with Arista by reselling Arista’s switching products.
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