Arista Acquires Big Switch Networks

Arista Networks has completed its acquisition of Big Switch Networks, a network monitoring and Software Defined Networking pioneer. “Arista Networks provides a complete and visionary cloud networking suite, with rich capabilities in all critical areas of the campus, data center and public cloud. The acquisition of Big Switch will further strengthen the company’s network monitoring and observability suite delivered through Arista’s software platform CloudVision and DANZ (Data ANalyZer) capabilities.”

The Best Software-Defined Network for the Best Network Efficiency (or Getting Ready for Exascale)

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a concept that has emerged in recent years to decouple network control and forwarding functions. The one network type that does not require special effort to adjust it to the computational needs of high-performance computing, deep learning or any other data intensive application is InfiniBand. In this guest article, Mellanox Technologies’ Gilad Shainer and Eitan Zahavi explore Infiniband networks and the benefits and potential of software-defined networking. 

Next Generation SDN Driven Systems for Exascale Data Intensive Science

Harvey Newman from CalTech presented this talk at the Mellanox booth at SC15. “We describe activities of the Caltech High Energy Physics team and collaborators, related to the use Software Defined Networking to help achieve fast and efficient data distribution and access. Results from Supercomputing 2014 are presented together with our work on the Advanced Network Services for the Experiments project, and a new project developing a Next Generation Integrated SDN Architecture, as well as our plans for Supercomputing 2015.”

Ciena Demos Multi-national, Multi-layer SDN Test Bed at SC13

In this video from SC13, Mitchell Auster from Ciena describes the company’s collaboration with Research & Education institutions CANARIE, Internet2, and StarLight to build an SDN Testbed meant to spur SDN innovation efforts for the entire industry.

Software Defined Storage and Networking – A Look Ahead

Henry Newman evaluates commodity hardware/software solutions that were once designed using ASICs for both storage and networking. He sees it working for software defined storage, but high-end networking will continue to develop its own ASICs, given that commodity hardware will not be able to meet the needs for performance and latency required in large core switches.

Technologies Changing Real-Time Deployments on Wall St.

For real-time deployments like financial services, the most current advancement to come along in the last two decades is the revolution of non-volatile memory as a persistent memory tier. We are only scratching the surface of how this new memory tier can be used to build systems that outperform and outscale similar systems that were built in the last few years. This technology allows reinventing all kind of software from database to messaging systems.