News

NEC Updates Software-Defined Networking Suite

• By David Ramel
• 03/10/2014

NEC Corp. last week announced version 5.1 of its ProgrammableFlow Networking Suite, highlighted by a new Unified Network Coordinator (UNC).

Exemplifying the growing trend of software-defined networking, the UNC component of the suite is described as an "OpenFlow-based, software-defined data center interconnect solution." NEC said the need for improved data center interconnectivity is driven by the enterprise requirements for higher business continuity, greater bandwidth demands, better access to dispersed applications and data, simpler data center management, and improved security through increased visibility.

"NEC’s new UNC tackles those issues and improves scalability of the network controller by 10 times over previous ProgrammableFlow controllers," the company said. "The UNC enables construction and orchestration of virtual networks across multiple controllers within a data center as well as across interconnects between data centers."

NEC said UNC can link virtual networks in different data centers, letting enterprises link to specific policies and providing for end-to-end policies spanning multiple controllers and domains.

Citing the 10x improvement in scalability, NEC said each ProgrammableFlow UNC can manage up to: 10 controllers, sites or zones in a large data center; 2,000 switches (up from a previous limit of 200); 30,000 Virtual Tenant Networks (VTN); 100,000 VLANs; and 10 million flows.

NEC said ProgrammableFlow networking is a next-generations solution that uses "OpenFlow technology to deliver a flattened, open networking topology that simplifies network management, proactively addresses performance and contributes to high availability of mission-critical business processes."

The company also said the UNC enables improved workload application mobility by letting enterprise customers move virtualized resources among dispersed locations, as can be required by data center expansion or consolidation.

The ProgrammableFlow version 5.1 controller and UNC are expected to be generally available in North America next month, according to NEC.