Here’s our gathering of the week’s news bits around software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and related topics.

… Big Switch Networks began offering Big Tap Monitoring Fabric Release 3.0, a production-grade SDN monitoring product running on commodity bare metal switches. The 3.0 release aims to simplify policy management and enable higher scale.

… Also on the visibility front, Ixia introduced a new platform designed to increase visibility while taking up half the rack space. The company’s Net Tool Optimizer 7300 is the company’s first modular network packet broker to serve large enterprises and service providers. According to TechTarget, NTO 7300’s large backplane bandwidth allows it to support wire-rate, port-to-port performance.

… Qosmos announced a new DPI module to provide service awareness to virtual switches. The Qosmos Service Aware Module (SAM) is also the first DPI module for vSwitch. The new module classifies flows at the hypervisor level, and the resulting protocol information and metadata are either used directly by the vSwitch or passed on to guest applications.

… Mellanox introduced CloudX, a reference architecture for building cloud platforms. CloudX is based on the company’s OpenCloud architecture that uses off-the-shelf components of servers, storage, interconnect, and software to form public, private, and hybrid clouds.

… Accedian Networks announced a cable operator/MSO product combination for performance assurance between customer routers and the data center. It's also a beginner's use case for virtualization and/or NFV, because it involves sucking the intelligence out of the customer premises equipment (CPE) and moving it to the data center. The hardware that remains on the CPE side is the new antModule, a small device that sits behind the customer's router. It performs minimal tasks such as generating traffic for performance testing. It talks to Accedian's V-NID, which sits in the data center and contains the service intelligence. The setup is a copper-based analogue to what Accedian does with its nanoNID product.

… As we noted earlier, Cyan is gearing up for a proof-of-concept (PoC) demonstration of end-to-end vEPC (virtual evolved packet core) NFV at next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It's an official ETSI PoC, built in collaboration with Intel, Red Hat, and Connectem. Take a sneak peek here.

… Radisys launched a series of telecom-cloud ready T-Series ATCA platforms that the company describes as pre-configured for SDN and NFV. The platforms are designed to meet telecom-grade requirements for high-performance, long life, and five-nines availability.