HP has announced the launch of OpenSwitch community, a new open source network operating system (NOS).
Accton Technology Corporation, Arista, Broadcom, Intel and VMWare, have combined to deliver a community-based platform that aims to provide a virtual innovation zone where a limitless number of developers and users can collaborate.
As part of the OpenSwitch Community, the vendor said users and developers can build upon the NOS that includes L2/L3 protocols support, open source Cloud database for configuration, inter-module communication through the system database and a universal API approach; CLI, REST, Puppet/Chef and Ansible.
Datacentre Networks IDC research director, Brad Casemore, said, “By decoupling the underlying switch hardware from the network operating systems that run on it, HP and the other early contributors of the OpenSwitch Community are seeking to enable enterprises and large Web-scale companies to innovate and engineer purpose-built Datacentres without the constraint of vendor lock-in.”
Arista vice-president of EOS product management and services, Jeff Raymond, said the company welcomed the OpenSwitch initiative as an example of disrupting the legacy models.
“Arista has always embraced merchant silicon and open standards-based networking. We believe the future integration of DevOps and NetOps requires a best-of-breed ecosystem across the Cloud stack,” he said.
Accton Technology Corporation general manager of Datacentre networks, George Tchaparian, said as a provider of open network switches, Accton understands that enterprises, telecoms and Cloud providers with Web-scale infrastructures want greater automation and control over their networks through the use of open software platforms.
“The new network operation system and supporting community will empower customers with this level of control, while significantly reducing network total cost of ownership.”
