NEC Corporation of America (NEC) today released a radically simplified architecture for data center and cloud networks with the introduction of the ProgrammableFlow Network Architecture and Product Family at Interop 2011 in Las Vegas. ProgrammableFlow will allow NEC customers to streamline the management of data center networks through greater levels of automation while driving down operational costs and time to deliver business services.
ProgrammableFlow leverages the OpenFlow protocol to create Software-Defined Network (SDN) virtualization, allowing NEC customers to deploy, control, monitor, and manage multi-tenant network infrastructure. This architecture provides ongoing investment protection as customers add functionality or upgrade their networks. NEC’s approach simplifies network administration and provides a programmable interface for unifying the deployment and management of network services with the rest of IT infrastructure.
ProgrammableFlow provides Superior Performance and Infrastructure Flexibility
Highlights of the ProgrammableFlow Product Family:
ProgrammableFlow Controller: ProgrammableFlow Controller Software brings the benefits of virtualization to high performance switching. Data centers can deploy, control, monitor, and manage multi-tenant network infrastructure all from a single console. With NEC’s Virtual Tenant Network technology, administrators can build multi-tenant networks in which virtual machine migration is unfettered, enabling rapid scaleout of new applications, balanced workloads, and higher levels of availability. ProgrammableFlow’s centralized control of the network eliminates the need for distributed protocols such as Spanning Tree, reducing network complexity and unlocking the network capacity often made unavailable in existing networks.
ProgrammableFlow PF5240 Switch: Nominated as a finalist for Best of Interop, the ProgrammableFlow switch is a powerful, hybrid technology that can integrate into a legacy environment, or fully function with OpenFlow-enabled benefits behind NEC’s ProgrammableFlow controller. With 48 ports of gigabit and 4 ports of 10-gigabit per second connectivity, the PF5240 provides line rate multi-layer switching, maintaining up to 160,000 network “flows” or units of OpenFlow communication. Flow-based networking enables organizations to migrate data traffic dynamically for maintenance and power savings. ProgrammableFlow can be deployed in any network topology, increasing network resiliency and capacity.
ProgrammableFlow Management Console: The centralized management capability of the ProgrammableFlow Management Console enables performance optimization of any OpenFlow-enabled network by monitoring end-to-end flows real-time from an intuitive user interface. The Console allows visualization of the physical network and of each virtual tenant network. This enables root-cause analysis for proactive management and increased network availability.
“ProgrammableFlow is a game changer - it enables us to grow and effectively manage a large number of customer environments while maintaining our 99.999% availability,” said Eric Miller, CEO of Genesis Hosting Solutions. “Network complexity has grown to a point beyond reasonable. ProgrammableFlow provides an automated means of network self-repair, and gives us the single pane of management and control we have long sought. By adopting ProgrammableFlow, we have significantly increased our efficiency and ability to grow our business.”
“Today’s announcement by NEC brings a new level of virtualization to the network,” said Jon Oltsik, Sr. Principal Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “The product’s ability to move, externalize, and centralize network control has the potential to cut operating and maintenance costs while enabling new opportunities for flexible network resource pooling. This is especially important for organizations with massive data centers or burgeoning cloud-based applications."
“This release represents to NEC’s customers a product that revolutionizes the way networks are deployed and managed,” said Don Clark, Director of Business Development, IT Platform Technologies, NEC. “When we co-founded the Clean Slate Program at Stanford University, we believed the research into OpenFlow could usher in a new era of open networking and innovation. ProgrammableFlow, built on OpenFlow and the first commercial product to leverage its benefits, brings intelligence and the ability to centrally and effectively administer business policy to the network. Customers can readily integrate ProgrammableFlow into legacy networks cost-effectively and scale to support the growth of their business.”
For more information on NEC’s ProgrammableFlow, please visit NEC at Interop, Booth 904, or our website at www.necam.com/PFlow.