Oracle is taking aim at the networking market with new virtual networking technologies announced this week.
Oracle’s Virtual Networking portfolio includes Software Defined Networking (SDN), Fabric Manager, Fabric Monitor, and Fabric Interconnect components. The core of the portfolio is an evolution of technologies that Oracle gained from its 2012 acquisition of Xsigo.
Among the updated components is the Oracle Fabric Manager 4.1 release, which will provide a common fabric for Oracle x86 Linux and SPARC Solaris-based server hardware platforms. The SPARC support is particularly important, as it now includes Oracle’s new T5 and M5 class servers, announced last week.
“As the industry’s fastest data center fabric, Oracle Virtual Networking enables increased performance and agility while virtually eliminating the complexity in traditional data centers,” Raju Penumatcha, Oracle’s Vice President of Product Development, Netra Systems and Networking, said in a statement. “Now with added support for the fastest processors on the planet and the first cloud OS, customers can leverage the benefits of Oracle Virtual Networking in both SPARC and x86 environments.”
SDN
The Oracle SDN solution promises to give an administrator the ability to connect 16,000 private virtual servers together.
The basic premise of Oracle’s SDN solution is similar to other industry SDN solutions. It enables an abstraction between the physical network and the application to enable greater scalability and control. Traditional networks had attempted to do that via VLANs, but those can only scale to 4,096 in number. With SDN there is no such limit.
“A single fabric link (or dual links for redundancy) carries both Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic, resulting in maximum management simplicity and the lowest possible physical complexity,” an Oracle SDN datasheet states. ” Oracle Virtual Networking protects your existing network investment by presenting standard Ethernet and Fibre Channel interfaces to your core networks.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
