Brocade unveils OpenDaylight SDN controller

Brocade this week unveiled an SDN controller based on open source code from the OpenDaylight multivendor and community consortium.

Brocade's Vyatta Controller is a commercial controller distribution based on OpenDaylight's "Helium" release. An open source controller allows customers to easily add functionality on top of the controller, which manages traffic forwarding in an SDN.

Some of the applications for SDN include bandwidth calendaring, context-aware policy enforcement, prioritization of unified communication traffic, security against distributed denial-of-service attacks, and network programmability and control for heterogeneous Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) environments.

Brocade says the tested and commercially supported Vyatta Controller supports a range of underlying physical and virtual network infrastructure, such as multivendor switches, routers, firewalls, VPNs and load balancers. Brocade says it will be continuously updated with OpenDaylight code, which means it will attain the group policy model and Cisco-developed OpFlex policy protocol in the "Lithium" release of OpenDaylight expected next year.

Juniper is also offering an open source controller with OpenContrail, but it is not based on OpenDaylight even though Juniper is contributing to the consortium. As a result, OpenContrail may lack the broad community support and application diversity that an OpenDaylight-based controller like Brocade Vyatta Controller enjoys, said Tom Nadeau, Brocade distinguished engineer, who jumped to the company from Juniper earlier this year after working on Juniper's SDN and NFV initiatives.

"It's Contrail code available through open source" channels, vs. community-developed open source code, Nadeau says.

Vyatta Controller can be deployed as a virtual machine on any major hypervisor, Brocade says. It is interoperable with leading third-party network infrastructure hardware in addition to Brocade's own switch and router lines, the company says.

This enables network administrators to operate their multivendor networks holistically, and on the basis of policy and desired behavior, Brocade says. Brocade also says any application developed to it is portable to any other OpenDaylight-based controller.

Initial applications available from Brocade for it are Path Explorer and Volumetric Traffic Management, which are designed to provide topology awareness and path optimization. The Path Explorer application will be available in November, concurrently with the Vyatta Controller.

The Volumetric Traffic Management application is planned for early 2015.

Brocade said it will announce pricing for Vyatta Controller and its applications when the products are generally available.