Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Networks
Private
Industry Technology
Founded 2010
Headquarters Santa Clara, California, United States
Key people
 CEO: Douglas Murray[1]
Products Software-defined networking
Number of employees
 51-200[2]
Website www.bigswitch.com

Big Switch Networks is a software-defined networking (SDN) company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, USA. The company designs, develops, and sells bare-metal networking fabrics. Currently, the company has two products: Big Tap Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric. These products are designed for the enterprise, service provider, and private data center environments.

Company

Big Switch Networks was founded in 2010 by Kyle Forster and Guido Appenzeller. As of June 2013, the company has raised $44.7M in venture funding.[3] Douglas Murray, a former Juniper and Sun Microsystems executive, joined the company as CEO in November 2013. [4]

Product Architecture

Bare-Metal SDN Design: Big Switch Networks’ products consists of a centralized product-specific controller managing a network of bare-metal Ethernet switches. The controller, the managed switches, and the various links connecting to them form the network fabric. The company designs both the software for the centralized controller (that runs on industry standard servers), and the operating system that runs on the bare-metal Ethernet switches. The controller software and the switch OS are tightly integrated. [5]

User Interface: The entire network fabric can be set up and managed centrally from the controller, and users need not directly configure individual switches. Users can programmatically interact with the centralized controller through a REST API. In addition, the company provides a GUI and a CLI for the controller that are built on top of the REST API. Once configured, the controller computes and pushes down an appropriate individual configurations for each switch.

Key Technologies

Switch Light OS: An operating system for physical bare-metal Ethernet switches based on Open Network Linux (ONL), an open source effort within the Open Compute Project.[6]

Switch Light vSwitch: A user space software module for KVM-based virtual switches that adds advanced functionality and improved performance on top of the Open vSwitch kernel.

Products

Big Tap Monitoring Fabric: A monitoring fabric consisting of a centralized Big Tap controller software and bare-metal Ethernet switches running the Switch Ligh OS. The centralized Big Tap controller compiles user defined policies into highly optimized flows which are then programmed into the switches.[7]

Big Cloud Fabric: A switching fabric where a single controller manages policy/forwarding across both a physical network fabric and the virtual (hypervisor) vSwitches connected to it. This product is designed for data centers. [8] The product is available in two editions: 1) P-Clos Edition: a leaf and spine physical Clos fabric controlled by the Big Cloud Fabric SDN controller, and 2) Unified P+V Clos Edition: a leaf, spine and vSwitch Clos fabric controlled by the Big Cloud Fabric SDN controller

Open Source Projects

In addition, Big Switch also sponsors and participates in several open source projects:

References

In-line references

  1. ↑ Big Switch Networks Team
  2. ↑ Big Switch LinkedIn Profile
  3. ↑ "Company Profile". http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/big-switch-networks''. Crunchbase.
  4. ↑ "Press Release". http://www.bigswitch.com/press-releases/2013/11/05/big-switch-networks-names-douglas-murray-as-new-ceo''. Big Switch Networks.
  5. ↑ "Big Tap Monitoring Fabric". http://www.bigswitch.com/products/big-tap-monitoring-fabric''. Big Switch Networks.
  6. ↑ "Switch Light". http://www.bigswitch.com/products/switch-light''. Big Switch Networks.
  7. ↑ "Big Tap Monitoring Fabric". http://www.bigswitch.com/products/big-tap-monitoring-fabric''. Big Switch Networks.
  8. ↑ "Big Cloud Fabric". http://bigswitch.com/sdn-products/big-cloud-fabric''.
  9. ↑ Project Floodlight
  10. ↑ Project Indigo

General references