News

Oracle Bolsters SDN Effort with Ethernet Switches, Network Services

• By David Ramel
• 03/04/2015

Oracle Corp. introduced new low-cost 10Gb/40Gb Ethernet switches to bolster its software-defined networking (SDN) offerings at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona.

The company also announced new virtual network services to provide security and other functionality.

The new products are aimed at cloud-based software-defined datacenters (SDDC). While the switches can be used independently, they're integrated with Oracle's Netra Modular System in order to "help collapse existing multi-tiered network topologies, simplifying IT infrastructure and reducing costs with fewer cables and simplified management," the company said.

Part of the company's "converged infrastructure strategy," the Netra Modular System was announced last week, targeting the communications industry. It's described as the first platform to integrate traditional blade and rackmount architectures with networking and storage in support of network function virtualization (NFW), a new-age networking technology closely associated with the SDN and SDDC movements.

"Oracle Ethernet Switch ES2-72 and Oracle Ethernet Switch ES2-64 are designed to harness the full capabilities of Oracle engineered systems, servers and storage with extremely low-latency and massive scalability for all Oracle applications including Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), as well as financial and high-performance computing (HPC) applications," the company said.

Oracle also said it was obviating the need for unscalable and inflexible purpose-built appliances to provide network services such as security, load balancing and routing. Instead, the company said, it's providing those functionalities on-demand through a single virtual instance with new Virtual Network Services added to its SDN technologies.

The services can be controlled from one central pane using the company's Oracle Fabric Manager console.

"Oracle SDN dynamically connects any virtual machine to any resource and allows for quick deployment of multi-tenant environments via a private virtual interconnect, which delivers up to 80 Gb/sec server-to-server bandwidth to radically accelerate application performance," the company said. "A single fabric connects up to 1,000 servers and 16,000 private virtual interconnects. With its new virtual network services capabilities, Oracle SDN now extends across the datacenter and is uniquely able to unify InfiniBand and Ethernet fabrics, allowing end-to-end provisioning of network infrastructure from a single management interface."

Along with the Netra Modular System, Oracle SDN also supports x86 architectures and the RISC-based SPARC architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, which was subsequently acquired by Oracle.