This excerpt from “Exploring Software-Defined Networking“ is sponsored by Brocade. It reflects the views of the sponsor, not ReadWrite’s editors.
Most discussions of SDN stop at the control and data planes. However, abstraction and programmability of the management layer of the network is critical to enable cloud orchestration applications to manage, end-to-end, all the infrastructure elements of the cloud—compute, storage, and network—for more rapid application delivery.
Rich Representation State Transfer (REST) and XML APIs provide access and programmability for Brocade networking equipment operating within cloud environments. In particular, the Network Operating System for the Brocade VDX Switches provides a fabric-level API, improving orchestration efficiency for higher-level constructs. The APIs may be used by SDN controllers, network automation tools, and cloud orchestration platforms of all types: delivered by in-house developers, commercial entities, and open source communities.
OpenStack is now the leading open source cloud orchestration framework. Formed in July 2010 by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, the OpenStack community hosts a range of projects or components—including Compute (Nova), Storage (Swift and Cinder), Network (Neutron), and Dashboard (Horizon)—with incremental releases made on a regular basis.
OpenStack is optimized for the cloud, as it enables interoperability between different vendor clouds. OpenStack is designed to be massively scalable, and it provides seamless management between private and public clouds.
Brocade is committed to the OpenStack community and to supporting its users through their cloud deployment lifecycles in three ways:
- Brocade plug-ins for OpenStack Neutron and Cinder
- Partnerships with leading open source providers to offer a consumable, supported path to orchestrating the On-Demand Data Center powered by Brocade
- Architectural contributions to the OpenStack community that leverage Brocade networking expertise
Brocade’s website has more information about its OpenStack initiatives.
Brocade provides a scale-out networking platform with robust APIs as a foundation for cloud orchestration with OpenStack and other cloud frameworks, facilitating automation of resource deployment by policy for a wide range of applications in cloud data centers.
This excerpt from “Exploring Software-Defined Networking“ is sponsored by Brocade. It reflects the views of the sponsor, not ReadWrite’s editors.
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