Big Switch Networks continues its push to bring hyperscale networking to carriers around the world with today's announcement featuring product enhancements and an elastic pricing model.

This morning, Big Switch unveiled Big Cloud Fabric 3.0 — a move the company hinted was around the corner in January — and added features to its newly named Big Monitoring Fabric (Big Switch CEO Doug Murray says the "Big Tap" moniker sometimes created confusion), in the second phase of what the company began last year. In its attempt to become more "Google-esque" as Murray puts it, Big Switch is on a mission to deliver hyperscale networking to everyone. In order to do so, Murray says it's important that Big Switch evolves as the industry does.

"One of the things we've seen in the last year is a shift -- the compute space has been transformed," says Murray. "Commodity, flexibility, and choice have become what people want. We have moved from the mainframe where users were locked into one vendor to being totally disaggregated. We want to do that exact same thing to the netframe. It's not just about software and hardware, but it's about how implement, troubleshoot, and upgrade. We see this disaggregation moving and unfolding in the next five to ten years."

Today's announcement helps deliver on Big Switch's hyperscale goal. With the new version of Big Cloud Fabric, the product will now have unified physical and virtual SDN fabric for OpenStack and an even deeper integration with VMware.

Docker integration will also be introduced in Big Cloud Fabric 3.0, as Murray says that containers will be crucial to the software-defined data center. Big Monitoring Fabric now has a service node that allows for deduplication and packet slicing. Later this year, it will have switch support for 100 Gb/s Ethernet.

Elastic pricing is the final piece of the Big Switch announcement — an industry first, according to Murray. The model is reminiscent of how certain U.S. wireless carriers operate. Instead of a long-term contract that doesn't offer much agility, people now have the option to opt out at any time.

"We want to disrupt the architecture, but also how people buy into networking," he says. "Google has elasticity, and we want the same thing for carriers and enterprises around the world. With our new pricing model, you get the switch, controller, and software, and you can scale up and scale down as you need to and decide how you want to deploy."

Murray says now is an exciting time for Big Switch, and not just because of the new features it is bringing to the table.

"For six quarters, we've grown over 40 percent per quarter. We are seeing the shift from initial trials to real life deployments," he says. "This is an exciting time for us because now we can move customers to these new architectures focusing on OpenStack and generic data center fabrics and VMware. People aren't just kicking the tires any more; they are getting the benefits and seeing the vision to come fruition."

Tomorrow, Big Switch will host a webinar demoing the latest features of today's announcement.