Big Switch, Avaya, IBM, VMware: SDN Strategies

My last post in this series on vendors' SDN strategies looked at SDN products from Juniper, Dell, Brocade, and Alcatel-Lucent/Nuage. In this final post of the series, I examine how Big Switch, Avaya, IBM, and VMware approach software-defined networking.

Big Switch
Big Switch was the first influential company founded to commercialize OpenFlow, and its core product remains an OpenFlow controller that’s available as a physical or virtual appliance. It works with switches from most major hardware vendors. The Big Virtual Switch and Big Tap applications integrate with the controller, and the company’s Switch Light is a software platform for merchant-silicon-based physical and virtual switches within hypervisors.

Big Switch has shifted strategy in the last year to focus on embedded controllers for switch hardware manufacturers, and on a unified physical-virtual fabric that works across all layers of the network stack, from bare-metal hardware and OpenStack virtual switches to network controllers and services, such as cloud data and monitoring fabrics.

Read the rest of this story on Network Computing.