Here's our weekly recap of news bits along the software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) trail.

1. Rackspace Makes a PaaS at Pivotal

Rackspace announced a new OpenStack-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) initiative called Project Solum. The Register called it "as ambiguous as it is incomplete," saying it's likely a reaction to "the types of automated runtime environments present in other platform-as-a-service things such as Pivotal's Cloud Foundry and, to a lesser extent, Red Hat's OpenShift."

2. Ixia CEO Fails the Test

Ixia CEO Vic Alston has been fired, as the company claims he falsified his resume. Chairman Errol Ginsberg has become acting CEO. Alston had been with Ixia for nine years and was named CEO in 2012.

(Funny how his college degree and age didn't matter for the last nine years but have now become reasons for termination. Lying on a resume is bad, but should executives really get fired for it?)

3. Huawei Preps for Enterprise SDN

At Broadband World Forum, Huawei announced the carrier-grade Smart Network Controller (SNC) and an orchestration system called Netmatrix. Both sound like substantial parts of Huawei's SDN strategy — but they're only in proof-of-concept mode and not available commercially, as Light Reading points out.

The announcements follow the August launch of Huawei's S12700 switch line for campus networks, which isn't an SDN "thing" inherently, although Huawei does say the switches come SDN-ready. The point is that Huawei sees opportunity for SDN in the enterprise — even in the U.S. market, where its efforts to get into carrier networks have been shot down.

4. Pica8 Gets an Upgrade

Pica8 released PicOS version 2.0 on Monday. It supports three environments: Debian Linux; OpenFlow and Open vSwitch; and the good old command-line interface. The mix is meant to help bridge the gap between a traditional network and a white-box environment, which of course makes sense. A lot of companies that want to build white-box networks are going to have to be eased into it.

5. OpenFlow: Get With the Times

In a blog published Monday, Ivan Pepelnjak explains why you want OpenFlow 1.3. It has to do with scaling, because OpenFlow 1.0 creates a lot of work for itself as you add multitenancy and access control lists (ACLs) to plain Layer 2 forwarding. NEC comes out well in his analysis, partly because it's shipping OpenFlow 1.3 products already — but of course, every vendor doing OpenFlow is going to have a version-1.3 product in due time.

6. Packet-Optical SDN

Companies selling integrated packet and optical gear have a natural leg up on providing multilayer visibility, a capability that could help service providers better exploit the benefits of SDN. You've heard Cyan talk about this approximately 100,000 times. Now, Transmode is the latest to announce a product along those lines — the Enlighten Portal, introduced at Broadband World Forum this week.

Targeting Carrier Ethernet services in particular, the portal is part of Transmode's overall Enlighten management and control suite, which includes SDN capabilities announced earlier in October — specifically, provisioning based on the Path Computation Element (PCE) standard.

 

7. The Unicorn-Powered SDN Data Center of Today

It's here, it's real (in Lego terms), and you can get a guided tour on the Ethereal Mind blog. Watch out for the Network Director; he seems to be enjoying his job way too much.