Here’s our weekly overview of various happenings in software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and similar spaces.

1. Sonus Brings Its SBC to the NFV Table

On Wednesday, Sonus launched the fully virtual version of its Sonus 5000 family of session border controllers, the SBC Software Edition (SWe). The company says it’s got all the functionality of the 5000s, but in virtual form — and that it scales linearly with the addition of more memory and CPU cores. They’ve gotten it to run up to 100,000 SIP sessions, says David Tipping, vice president of Sonus’ SBC business.

The scale is what makes SWe special, Sonus says. But virtual SBCs also represent an interesting NFV possibility and a potential means for SBC vendors to sell to other equipment vendors. A company that’s assembling an ATCA-based box could drop in the SWe software to add support for, say, voice features.

SWe started customer trials in the summer and is set for general availability in November.

2. IBM’s Virtual-Machine Mover in the Cloud

IBM announced this week that it’s been granted a patent for a particular scenario of virtual-machine migration. It’s an automated process where software checks the bandwidth being assigned to each workload. If one job starts to hog the bandwidth, the software will migrate the other jobs on that server, moving them to save havens where bandwidth flows like milk and honey, or something like that.

As Barb Darrow of GigaOm explains, IBM’s work is aimed at the noisy neighbor problem — where one bad actor starts affecting the performance of other jobs on the same server.

3. Big Switch: Big in Japan

Big Switch Networks signed Uniadex as a distributor in Japan, giving the company a foothold in the country that’s been the most obsessive about OpenFlow. I’ve always been a little unclear on whether that obsession comes from something cultural, or whether it’s a trickle-down effect from NEC‘s affinity for the technology. Either way, it seems like a market Big Switch would want to cling to; Uniadex will be pitching the company’s products to the education and enterprise markets.

Big Switch retooled its business model earlier this year to concentrate on OpenFlow, setting itself squarely against the overlay model.