Brocade is aiming to bolster its cloud capabilities by way of a new partnership with Piston Cloud computing.
The partnership will see the Brocade VCS Fabric melded to a Piston Cloud designed OpenStack platform. Piston Cloud is a commercial vendor building its own OpenStack distribution. With OpenStack and its included Quantum network virtualization components the line will be begin to blur between Software Defined Networking (SDN) and the cloud.
“One of the challenges for people deploying OpenStack is crossing the line between their traditional networking infrastructure and their new virtualized or SDN infrastructure,” Joshua McKenty, CEO of Piston Cloud told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. “Working in a tighter relationship with Brocade allows us to automate a lot of that challenge.”
McKenty added that it’s orchestration of the physical and virtual networking where the two companies can work together. OpenStack already has its own networking technology known as Quantum, though McKenty stressed that the Piston Brocade partnership is more involved.
Brocade is no stranger to programmable networks and SDN and is also active in OpenFlow related efforts. OpenFlow and the efforts with OpenStack though address very different issues.
Ken Ross, director product management at Brocade explained to EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet that the focus with OpenStack is on the management and orchestration side. In contrast, with OpenFlow the focus is more on the control plane side of the network itself.
“We see them as complementary efforts,” Ross said. “We see an evolution of orchestration offerings like OpenStack needing to take account of OpenFlow in the future, but the work we’ve been doing in OpenStack right now is more basic.”
Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Brocade Powers Up Its Cloud Network Efforts with Piston OpenStack
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.