Big Switch Networks, Dell and Mirantis Showcase Resiliency, Simplicity and Unprecedented Scale With OpenStack Networking

Big Cloud Fabric Unified P+V Solution, Dell Open Networking & Mirantis OpenStack Validated for Resiliency, Ease of Deployment, and Record Scalability Benchmark on 8-Rack, 300 Node Pod

| Source: Big Switch Networks Big Switch Networks

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 27, 2015) - Big Switch Networks®, the leader in bringing hyperscale-inspired networking architecture to data centers worldwide, today announced its collaboration with Dell and Mirantis to showcase the largest OpenStack Neutron networking reference architecture using a P+V SDN Fabric. The joint solution, which leveraged Mirantis OpenStack, Big Cloud Fabric (P+V Edition) and Dell Open Networking switches was tested on a fully populated 8-rack, 300 node OpenStack data center Pod at the Dell Open Networking center of excellence in Santa Clara, CA. for a top-tier US mobile carrier and a large US federal government customer. The joint solution was deployed in just two hours.

"Our large-scale deployment with Dell and Mirantis OpenStack is a testament to the maturity of open networking," said Big Switch CEO Douglas Murray. "This solution, which validates resilience at scale, is the largest reference architecture deployment with OpenStack Neutron and significantly reduces the complexity and obstacles previously faced with OpenStack deployments at scale."

OpenStack offers one of the simplest ways to deploy private clouds that enable rapid, elastic and massively scalable service deployment for end-users. For traditional networking technologies however, OpenStack represents a design challenge. With Project Neutron, the OpenStack community has made significant progress in creating a modular, plugin architecture that relies on well-defined APIs to provide 'Networking as a Service'. However, challenges remained in two key areas -- Ease of Deployment & Scale of Neutron Networking. This reference architecture and scale testing represents an important validation of OpenStack networking, and provides an ideal option for OpenStack networking deployments.

Big Switch Networks introduced Big Cloud Fabric (P+V Edition)—the industry's first Unified SDN fabric that delivers a highly resilient and automated networking solution for OpenStack data centers—to address the challenges commonly faced with OpenStack deployments. Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) is built as a leaf, spine and virtual switch fabric, with the Big Cloud Fabric Controller acting as the centralized pane for provisioning, troubleshooting, visibility and analytics of the entire physical and virtual network environment.

Big Switch collaborated with Dell and Mirantis to deploy and test a fully populated 8-rack datacenter Pod (300 compute nodes) using Mirantis OpenStack 6.1. BCF OpenStack Installer (BOSI) was used to deploy Neutron plugin and Horizon extensions, as well as Switch Light VX (a user space software agent for KVM-based virtual switches that adds advanced functionality and improved performance on top of the Open vSwitch kernel) on all compute nodes. The setup included Big Cloud Fabric Controllers in HA configuration, Dell Open Networking switches (S4048-ON/S6000-ON), Switch Light VX for host vSwitches and Dell Servers (R220) as compute nodes.

Key OpenStack Neutron enhancements and features validated in the test:

  • Distributed Virtual Routing & Distributed NAT / Floating IP - Address L3 agent bottleneck and traffic hair-pinning issues
  • Simplified Troubleshooting - End-to-end visibility across physical and virtual switches, including security group policies.

"Through our collaboration with Dell Networking and Big Switch, we offer our customers a fully scalable OpenStack solution for an agile data center," said Kamesh Pemmaraju, VP Product Marketing, Mirantis. "The solution combines record scalability with Mirantis OpenStack's ease of deployment, so that customers can be up and running in a few hours."

The complete solution included:

  • Dell Networking Switches & Servers including 22 10/40GbE open networking switches (18 S4048-ON switches and 4 S6000-ON switches) and 302 1RU rack servers (PowerEdge Series).
  • Mirantis OpenStack with Fuel installer for rapid, flexible and stable deployment of OpenStack components.
  • Big Cloud Fabric (Physical + Virtual Edition) with 297 Switch Light VX host vSwitches, BCF OpenStack Neutron Plugin for L2+L3 networking using ML2 driver and L3 plugin, to provide scale and resiliency necessary for production-grade OpenStack deployments.
  • Big Cloud Fabric OpenStack Installer (BOSI) - a plugin for OpenStack installation that seamlessly interoperates with Mirantis OpenStack and Fuel installer to handle all networking related installation and configuration tasks on OS Controller and Compute nodes.

OpenStack Resiliency - Chaos Monkey "Torture Test"
Big Switch and Mirantis partnered last year to test Big Cloud Fabric and Neutron networking via the Chaos Monkey "torture test," by putting together a 16- rack pod outfitted with compute, storage and software to run the Hadoop Terasort benchmark on Mirantis OpenStack. Despite adding 42,000 simulated VMs to the network and then forcing failures to the Big Cloud Fabric SDN controllers every 30 seconds, forcing failures to random switches every 8 seconds and random links in the fabric every 4 seconds, there was no change in the application performance. The test validated the resiliency of the application performance and acted as a catalyst for the collaboration between Big Switch, Dell and Mirantis to test resilience at scale.

Big Switch Networks introduced Big Cloud Fabric (P+V Edition) -- the industry's first Unified SDN fabric that delivers a highly resilient and automated networking solution for OpenStack data centers -- to address the challenges commonly faced with OpenStack deployments. Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) is built as a leaf, spine and virtual switch fabric, with the BCF Controller acting as the centralized pane for provisioning, troubleshooting, visibility and analytics of the entire physical and virtual network environment.

"Through our work with Big Switch and Mirantis, our mission to bring next-generation open networking solutions to our customers is being realized," said Adnan Bhutta, Director of Global Strategy, Dell Networking. "Our collaboration unlocks an easy to deploy and scalable OpenStack SDN solution."

"Through our collaboration with Dell Networking and Big Switch, we offer our customers a fully scalable OpenStack solution for an agile data center," said Kamesh Pemmaraju, VP Product Marketing, Mirantis. "The solution combines record scalability with Mirantis OpenStack's ease of deployment, so that customers can be up and running in a few hours."

Fully populated 8-Rack OpenStack Pod with 300 Dell servers and Big Cloud Fabric (P+V Edition) was deployed in hours using Mirantis OpenStack 6.1 and tested for OpenStack Neutron scale and resilience.

To Learn More

Tweet this: .@bigswitch @DellNetworking @MirantisIT test and deploy OpenStack Neutron networking at scale with Unified P+V architecture - http://bit.ly/1Ly3X6y

About Big Switch Networks
Big Switch Networks is the market leader in bringing hyperscale data center networking technologies to a mainstream data center audience. The company is taking three key hyperscale technologies -- OEM/ODM bare metal and open Ethernet switch hardware, sophisticated SDN control software, and core-and-pod data center designs -- and leveraging them in fit-for-purpose products designed for use in enterprises, cloud providers, and service providers. The company's Big Monitoring Fabric is a feature-rich next-generation Network Packet Broker to monitor existing networks, and Big Cloud Fabric is the industry's most advanced open networking switching fabric intended for new data center pods such as OpenStack private cloud, VMware NSX, big data, and VDI. For additional information, email info@bigswitch.com, follow @bigswitch, or visit www.bigswitch.com.

Big Switch Networks, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Monitoring Fabric, Switch Light OS, and Switch Light VX are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.

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