SDN is engendering debate within IT, the likes of which we’ve not seen in a decade or more. Every week some industry and financial analyst weighs in on the expected winners and losers, their pen shifting valuations a billion dollars at a time. Most recently, Scott Thompson at FBR Capital stated that the market for routers and switches is at a ‘dead end,’ the ‘end of an era,’ and requires a shift to a ‘software and service-centric business model.’ He then goes on to say that ‘customers will increasingly use more lower-margin white box products.’ Can a switch vendor benefit from this transition and embrace change?
We believe the answer is an emphatic yes. Working with partner Big Switch Networks, we will be offering a lightweight switch with Switch Light, a thin switching platform based on Indigo, part of the open source SDN Floodlight effort.
With Slalom, fast, cost effective SDN just became a downhill run.
Our new product, aligned in theme with our extreme sports skiing culture, is called the Slalom™. The very name fits this type of switch perfectly, as its fast, focused and its purpose is very clear – to take users where they want to go very quickly and cost effectively, with the lightest burden. It is part of our Open Fabric solution.
The Slalom complements our ExtremeXOS-based stackable and chassis-based switches, now offering customers, enterprise and service provider alike, a combination of ‘hybrid’ mode switches supporting Layer 2, Layer 3, and SDN deployments, as well as lightweight SDN-only leaf switches. They now have maximum choice by deploying the architecture that best suits their business needs. In fact, our customers today are beginning to deploy our SDN-capable switches, given that in February of this year we were one of the first switch vendors to productize both OpenFlow and OpenStack in a generally available and supported release.
Now some may call this a “white-box solution” – as much of the speculation about SDN is that it will obsolete hardware investments and even create a market where performance doesn’t matter. However, with today’s news and Extreme Networks SDN network vision, we choose to take an approach that is more likely to happen because it is more pragmatic and deployable. And in the future, the open source Switch Light will lend itself to OS and even application layer enhancements.
Our ultimate goal is to provide our customers with a comprehensive portfolio of data center, campus core, aggregation and access switches, leveraging a rich software foundation, optimized for their business needs, and backed by our global service and support capabilities.
The future is bright and more innovation is to come. Please stay tuned! In the meantime, here is our press release on Slalom.
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