– Steve Garrison, Vice President of Product Marketing at Pica8, says:
Pica8 Inc. has announced its Pica8 Open Data Center Framework. The framework is designed to provide the essential building blocks toward an eventual transformation to programmable and agile data center networks, including OpenFlow 1.2 and Open vSwitch. This framework will enable cloud providers and web services companies to drive down the costs of application services provisioning in response to customer demands.
In the Open Data Center Framework, Pica8 is extending its Open Networking vision, blending the conceptual benefits of the server and conventional networking worlds. The framework is designed for cloud and data center service providers looking to fundamentally change how they operate and manage their network. It enables the use of white box switches for lower Capex.
Using white box switches simplify the planning and execution of upgrade processes, creating a plug-and-play environment. According to Seamus Crehan, president of Crehan Research, “Pica8’s framework for a programmable network strives to lay the foundation for an improved way to upgrade network devices, paralleling what is coined a “rip and replace” model on the server side.”
By leveraging the Open Data Center Framework for more granular application flow management, Pica8 technology enables customers to personalize and abstract the OS from the hardware, which enables service providers to utilize commoditized switches in a similar rip-and-replace fashion to swapping out a white box server.
Pica8 top-of-rack switches have been deployed in several reference architectures running OVS (Open vSwitch) with RYU, an OpenFlow 1.2 controller from NTT Laboratories. The integrated deployments provide distributed intelligence along with the orchestration needed to provision services to meet specific application needs.
To deliver a personalized data center experience, the Pica8 Open Data Center framework will continue to leverage SDN to develop components needed to manage and provision the network. OpenFlow 1.2 and OVS bring capabilities such as: GRE tunneling for overlays, traffic engineering to optimize network resources and SDN-based network taps for ensuring application flow performance. These capabilities enable network architects to better understand how to best deploy SDN solutions and leverage the idea of managing individual flows.
Steve Garrison | Vice President of Product Marketing
Steve Garrison is a networking systems veteran with nearly 20 years of technology marketing experience. At Pica8, he leads go-to-market and brand development strategies. Prior to joining Pica8, Steve has held global marketing positions at public and venture-backed companies, including Infoblox, Force10 Networks (acquired by Dell, Inc.) and Riverstone Networks (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent). He holds a MS in Materials Science Engineering from MIT and a BS in Ceramic Science and Physics from Alfred University.
Steve Garrison is a networking systems veteran with nearly 20 years of technology marketing experience. At Pica8, he leads go-to-market and brand development strategies. Prior to joining Pica8, Steve has held global marketing positions at public and venture-backed companies, including Infoblox, Force10 Networks (acquired by Dell, Inc.) and Riverstone Networks (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent). He holds a MS in Materials Science Engineering from MIT and a BS in Ceramic Science and Physics from Alfred University.
