HP Launches Software-Defined Network Fabric For Cloud

HP has unveiled the datacentre network fabric built on HP FlexNetwork architecture, enabling business agility for clients by delivering greater scalability and less complexity over current network fabrics while reducing network provisioning time.

As companies move to a cloud environment, legacy network architectures are buckling under the pressure for instant access to applications and services that offer a high-quality user experience. Organisations also are struggling with the complexity of current datacentre network fabric designs, which require manual device-by-device configurations and limit the performance of bandwidth-intensive applications.

HP is addressing these challenges with a series of software-defined network (SDN) datacentre switches that deliver advanced automation capabilities and industry-leading scalability for bandwidth-intensive applications such as Hadoop. The new offerings include the new HP FlexFabric 12900, which is the OpenFlow-enabled core switch capable of scaling to meet the demands of increasing virtualised workloads.

“For the past 20 years, datacentre networks have lagged in supporting new enterprise demands for cloud, virtualisation and big data,” Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP Networking, HP India. “Only HP is positioned to deliver the industry’s most complete software-defined datacentre network fabric with innovations that enable our customers to create a network foundation that will meet their needs today and well into the future.”

By simplifying network design and operations, new HP Networking solutions enable customers to improve IT productivity by unifying the virtual and physical fabric with new HP FlexFabric Virtual Switch 5900v software, which, in conjunction with the HP FlexFabric 5900 physical switch, delivers advanced networking functionalities such as policies and quality of service to a VMware environment. Integrated Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator (VEPA) technology provides clear separation between server and network administrations to deliver operational simplicity.

It reduces datacentre footprint with the HP Virtualized Services Router (VSR), which allows services to be delivered on a virtual machine (VM), eliminating unnecessary hardware, by leveraging the carrier-class software-based Network Function Virtualization (NFV).