HP announces SDN technology advances
To help businesses with networking and data centres
HP has announced that it come up with a way to solve the challenges created by legacy networks.
The company has launched what it it claims is the industry’s first open-standards-based software-defined network (SDN) technology that will span infrastructure, control software and application layers with a single control plane.
It says this new service will enable enterprises and cloud providers to simplify and maximise agility across data centrw, campus and branch networks.
Joe Skorupa, vice president and analyst at Gartner said that to solve the challenges created by legacy networks, organisations needed to be able to automate the network from end to end “by leveraging SDN to abstract the control plane from the physical infrastructure.”
He said that in order to do this customers had to ensure that there was a suite of SDN technologies across the entire network. This spanned from the hardware infrastructure to the control plane to the applications as well as from the data centre to the desktop, “in order to move beyond today’s complexities and improve business agility across the enterprise.”
The new HP technologies are claimed to cover all layers by including an SDN controller, and SDN applications and services that strengthen the company’s Virtual Application Networks strategy.
The company said that as a result, clients could achieve the full potential of SDN technologies through the abstraction, programming and automation of their networks.
It said its infrastructure layer would deliver open programmable access through OpenFlow, a networking service that automates hardware configurations.
This is done through a new SDN tool in the infrastructure layer, which enables clients to simplify network configuration.
HP has also announced nine additional switch models providing OpenFlow-enabled support for HP FlexNetwork architecture, offering clients a flexible and programmable standards-based interface.
Within the control layer, the new HP Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller abstracts the physical hardware from the logical deployment, and is claimed to provide a centralised view and automating network configuration of all devices in the infrastructure.
This is said to benefit companies by eliminating thousands of manual CLI entries, as well as providing application program interfaces (APIs) to third-party developers to integrate custom enterprise applications.
Furthermore the new HP Virtual Cloud Networks software enables cloud providers to deliver automated public cloud services to enterprises.
HP said that by using this software, businesses can create an isolated virtual cloud network environment through a self-service public cloud infrastructure, providing them complete control for introducing new services and applications to their users.
HP has also added options to its Technology Services, which is said to guide clients through SDN roadmap development, architecture creation, governance preparedness and proof of concept.
Services here include a HP Transformation Experience Workshop, which provides insight into SDN transformation benefits and IT implications from the perspective of people, process and technology.
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