Big Switch Networks Addresses Hybrid Cloud in Its Portfolio

Big Switch Networks, the cloud-first networking company, today announced four new products and/or features extending its cloud-first networking portfolio to the hybrid cloud, addressing the challenges presented by hybrid environments and shadow IT, including lack of operational consistency, visibility, and IT governance.

The new product introductions include: Public Cloud VPC (virtual private cloud) Management/Governance, VPC for Hybrid Cloud Networking, Management for Hybrid Cloud Networking and Automation Tooling for Hybrid Cloud Networking.

Big Switch Networks’ Prashant Gandhi

“What we’re addressing now is managing VPCs in the cloud, especially shadow IT — which a set of our customers has been asking for — they’d like to have the visibility, the ability to troubleshoot applications or performance issues, they’d like to apply consistent security policies and, in some cases,  they’d like to control the VPCs and networking by central IT or IT that manages infrastructure,” Prashant Gandhi, chief product officer, Big Switch Networks told Channel Partners.

The vendor is bringing its Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) controller technology into public cloud to manage VPCs in AWS. Big Cloud Fabric Controller for AWS Public Cloud addresses the growing need for enterprise IT to manage and control shadow IT in AWS. It gives companies full visibility and control of AWS VPCs – including discover, visualize, and troubleshoot VPCs configured in AWS across multiple user accounts.

The BCF capabilities offer easy deployment and a cost-effective management approach for enterprise networking teams ensuring IT operational consistency and compliance. Designed with cloud-first principles, BCF enables common operational and troubleshooting workflows across AWS public cloud and on-prem environments for VPC management and visibility, which dramatically simplifies hybrid cloud networking even in a multiteam NetOps, CloudOps, or DevOps environment. This product is currently shipping.

“If you’re able to manage VPCs on-prem through our Enterprise VPC, what about hybrid cloud?” said Gandhi. “This is where the concept of global VPC is important. It’s not an on-prem VPC or pubic VPC but it’s one common or hybrid cloud VPC.”

The second product introduction is Global VPCs (G-VPCs) for Hybrid Cloud Network-as-a-Service.

Introduced as a new technology in Big Cloud Fabric, a Global VPC defines a logical networking construct across hybrid cloud. It’s inspired by Google Cloud’s globally relevant VPC. BCF extends the G-VPC construct globally across all BCF deployments: data centers, edge clouds, AWS Outposts/AzureStack/Google Anthos, and multiple public clouds to create a Global VPC (G-VPC) for hybrid cloud network-as-a-service. G-VPCs provide the next evolution to the multi-tenant network, for the cloud generation, with a single logical construct and administrative domain for a tenant’s network.

Also introduced today is the Coud-based Multi-Cloud-Director Service for Hybrid Cloud Management.

The vendor’s already existing Multi-Cloud Director (MCD) is available as an on-premises solution. To simplify the hybrid cloud experience, Big Switch Networks added the Cloud-based Multi-Cloud Director Service for Hybrid Cloud. It provides a single operational console for managing multiple BCF controllers as well as G-VPCs deployed across hybrid cloud: data centers and edge locations, public clouds, as well as public cloud extensions such as AWS Outposts.

With the new cloud-based service offering, MCD-as-a-Service, IT organizations can…

…securely access and operate all of their Big Cloud Fabric deployments from MCD’s multitenant cloud dashboard, anywhere and at any time. MCD-as-a-Service enables Big Switch to provide IT organizations with hybrid cloud intelligence including optimal capacity planning, design best practices, automatic security alerts, scheduled upgrades and infrastructure consistency, while ensuring a common governance model through built-in role-based access control.

Managed service providers (MSPs), system integrators and channel partners can leverage MCDaaS to offer deployment and monitoring services, for an additional business opportunity.

With Automated Deployment Across Hybrid Cloud, Big Switch is leveraging Terraform, an open-source cloud automation tool, to automatically deploy VPCs and G-VPCs across hybrid cloud. Terraform allows hybrid cloud infrastructure to be expressed as code blueprint, which can be versioned, shared and/or reused for safe and efficient change management with minimum admin interaction.

Global VPCs for Hybrid Cloud Network-as-a-Service, Cloud-based Multi-Cloud Director Service for Hybrid Cloud Management and Automated Deployment Across Hybrid Cloud, will be available in beta by year end.