HP's OpenSwitch Community, New Open Source OS Gaining Backers
HP is expanding its plans surrounding the launch of the OpenSwitch community and a new open source network operating system (NOS). Recently, HP and partners Accton Technology Corporation, Arista, Broadcom, Intel, and VMware said they are delivering a community-based platform that provides developers and users the ability to accelerate innovation, avoid vendor lock-in, and realize investment protection as they build data center networks customized for unique business applications.
The OpenSwitch Community is being billed as "a virtual innovation zone" and HP has developed an open source network operating system that can serve data centers.
"Open source software, with its collaborative community of specialized developers, accelerates innovation and improves the stability of the software platform, providing organizations with a more powerful infrastructure to support their specific business requirements," said Mark Carroll, chief technology officer for HP Networking. "The newly formed developer community and Linux-based OpenSwitch NOS early release code will help developers address the rapidly evolving business and web-scale networking needs in the industry."
HP's newly released operating system includes the following:
-- A fully featured NOS with L2/L3 protocols support
-- Open source cloud database for persistent and ephemeral configuration
-- All inter-module communication is through system database
-- Universal API approach: CLI, REST, Puppet/Chef, Ansible
"As a leading provider of open network switches, we understand that enterprises, telecoms and cloud providers with web-scale infrastructures want greater automation and control over their networks through the use of open software platforms," said George Tchaparian, GM of Data Center Networks, Accton Technology Corporation. "The new network operating system and supporting community will empower customers with this level of control, while significantly reducing network total cost of ownership."
The OpenSwitch Community is operating today. You can visit www.openswitch.net for information about OpenSwitch NOS, how to join the community and where to obtain the initial developer release.