HP announces software-defined network technologies

martin237 | October 4, 2012 | 0 Comments

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2012/121002a.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news

HP today announced the industry’s first open-standards-based software-defined network (SDN) technologies to span infrastructure, control software and application layers with a “single control plane” that enables enterprises and cloud providers to simplify and maximize agility across data center, campus and branch networks.⁽¹⁾

“To solve the challenges created by legacy networks, organizations need the ability to automate the network from end to end by leveraging SDN to abstract the control plane from the physical infrastructure,” said Joe Skorupa, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner. “For maximum performance, utilization and simplicity, customers must ensure that there is a suite of SDN technologies across the entire network—from the hardware infrastructure to the control plane to the applications, and also from the data center to the desktop—in order to move beyond today’s complexities and improve business agility across the enterprise.”

As companies move to cloud and other computing environments, manual configuration of networks through command-line interface (CLI) coding has proven to be error prone, as well as time and resource intensive. SDN overlay-point products offer a centralized control plane, but fall short by not enabling automated configuration of network infrastructure or providing SDN applications to roll out new services for campus and branch networks. This incomplete approach creates complexity and unnecessary manual coding requirements.

Anything the vendors and service providers can do to reduce complexity and aid in infrastructure management has to be a good thing, as we virtualize the infrastructure and introduce additional layers or technology to deliver a service, we need to be able to monitor both individually and as a whole application and infrastructure availability and delivery.