Big Switch packed four hybrid cloud related products and features into one announcement on Wednesday to address the challenges of hybrid environments.
The new Big Switch hybrid cloud solutions address the challenges that are inherent in hybrid cloud deployments and shadow IT including lack of operational consistency, visibility and governance.
Big Switch Networks Chief Product Officer Prashant Gandhi said that his company has been working on hybrid cloud deployments across on prem and public cloud environments.
"We want to simplify hybrid cloud networking to make it real and easy for customers," said Gandhi. "One of the things we thought was important was to bring cloud constructs on prem. You want to make sure the cloud experience is consistent across both on prem and in the public cloud."
Last year Big Switch announced its virtual private cloud (VPC) for private cloud or virtual networks, which are used by Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft Azure on prem, to deliver networking-as-a-service. In Wednesday's announcement Big Switch said it has brought its Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) controller technology into the public cloud to manage VPCs in Amazon Web Services (AWS.)
BCF for AWS addresses the growing need for enterprise IT to manage and control shadow IT, by giving IT organizations full visibility and control of AWS VPCs including discovery, visualization and troubleshooting across multiple user accounts.
The BCF capabilities offer a cost-effective management approach for enterprise networking teams whose responsibilities extend into AWS while also ensuring operational consistency and compliance across various environments such as DevOps, CloudOps and NetOps. Gandhi said BCF for AWS is available today via Amazon Marketplace, as both a free and premium version.
The second product announcement is Global VPCs (G-VPCs) for hybrid cloud network-as-a-service deployments.
"We're able to manage VPCs in public cloud, but when it comes to hybrid cloud it's connected, it's on prem and public cloud," Gandhi said. "It's not two isolated entities. We manage VPCs in public cloud, but they were still using separate controllers. How do we make this a more cohesive experience across hybrid cloud where the two entities, on prem and public cloud, are connected?
"We kind of looked around for an inspiration we can take from a cloud provider, and it turns out Google Cloud had a notion of global VCP, which runs across all of their regions. It's a common, unified VPC across all regions."
BCF extends the G-VPC across all deployments: data centers, edge clouds and multiple public clouds. G-VPCs fully abstract the underlying infrastructure and provide a single API interface to globally deploy and manage hybrid cloud services.
The benefit to enterprises for using G-VPC is they can instantiate tenants across hybrid cloud, regardless of the underlying network variations.
Big Switch also announced its Multi-Cloud Director - Cloud Service (MCD-CS) for hybrid cloud deployments. Gandhi said Big Switch's Multi-Cloud Director is already available on prem. With MCD-CS, Big Switch said it's the first vendor to offer a cloud-based dashboard.
With MCD-CS, IT teams can access and operate all of their BCF deployments from MCD’s multi-tenant cloud dashboard, anywhere and at any time, according to Gandhi. MCD-CS provides IT organizations with hybrid cloud intelligence including optimal capacity planning, design best practices, automatic security alerts, scheduled upgrades and infrastructure consistency.