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Free SDN Community Edition Offered by Big Switch

• By David Ramel
• 01/29/2016

Just last week, Big Switch Networks garnered new funding of $48.5 million, demonstrating continuing momentum for the upstart software-defined networking (SDN) technology that's transforming traditional enterprise datacenters.

This week, the company announced a free Community Edition of its Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric SDN products, claiming it's "the networking industry's first freemium model: software worth $25,000, now available to download and deploy."

Big Monitoring Fabric (formerly called Big Tap) is described as a next-generation network packet broker (NPB) based on SDN principles and Open Networking switches that's designed provide scale-out datacenter monitoring at less cost than traditional alternatives. The company said it's suitable for use cases such as monitoring racks, mobile/LTE monitoring, remote DC monitoring and for providing DMZ/Extranet inline security.

Big Cloud Fabric is claimed by the company to be the industry's first leaf/spine SDN fabric that supports open networking switches. Its controller serves as a "single pane of glass" used to provision networks, troubleshoot problems and provide network visibility and analytics of a complete network environment, both physical and virtual.

The company also announced enhancements to those products, including advanced fabric analytics, new switch hardware support, OpenStack certification, better security and more.

The Community Edition includes Big Monitoring Fabric software for one switch and virtual machine (VM) controller pair and Big Cloud Fabric software for one leaf pair and VM controller pair.

"Community Edition is an industry-first freemium offering for datacenter networking," the company said. "The software is a perpetual license of both Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric that can be downloaded for use in lab and development environments. Community Edition makes it easy for organizations to download software on premise and provides the opportunity to experience the agility, efficiency, ease of management and economics of SDN fabrics and open networking switches."