Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager with Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric

Leverage the flexibility of a software-based solution, by combining Riverbed® SteelApp Traffic Manager™ with SDN-powered bare metal-based Big Cloud Fabric from Big Switch Networks, to deliver optimal performance, automation, and resilience for cloud-scale applications.

The ChALLeNge Enterprises are constantly seeking to deploy applications that can improve productivity and provide competitive advantage, while lowering their TCO. With new deployment models like virtualization and cloud, demanding applications require a data center network infrastructure that is agile, elastic and automated to meet the needs of their users and exceed business SLA’s. Because traditional data centers use a multi-tier network design optimized for client-to-server (north-south) traffic, scaling server-to-server (east-west) traffic efficiently and resiliently becomes a challenge. For optimal application experience, an application delivery infrastructure that can intelligently manage traffic loads and scale proportionally across physical and virtual workloads is essential.

The SoLuTioNRiverbed and Big Switch Networks have partnered to deliver a scalable and cost-effective solution that enables ease-of-deployment of applications with seamless pod-centric insertion into existing data centers. The Big Switch and Riverbed joint solution lowers TCO by leveraging low-cost, high-speed bare metal switches and a “pay-as-you-grow” application delivery pricing model. Inspired by hyperscale network designs, the SDN-powered solution enables operational simplicity and automation by providing a single pane-of-glass for configuration, management and troubleshooting. The deployment of SteelApp Traffic Manager within the Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) enables applications to take advantage of high east-west bisectional bandwidth, secure multi-tenancy, and workload elasticity, while ensuring optimal performance and easy customization for specific organizational requirements.

The SoLuTioN CoMPoNeNTSSteelApp Traffic ManagerSteelApp Traffic Manager is a virtual ADC that is ideal for cloud environments and is easily integrated into application stacks. It can be deployed in any IT environment to optimize application performance, security and resource efficiency. It will improve external facing Web applications as well as services for many types of internal business applications and protocols. This full-featured Layer-7 ADC controls and optimizes end-user services by inspecting, transforming, prioritizing, and routing application traffic. The software provides economic advantages to customers by minimizing CapEx with pay-as-you-grow pricing and also reduces the operational costs linked to supporting applications.

The Big Cloud FabricThe BCF embraces the following hyperscale design principles to enable rapid innovation, ease of provisioning and management, while reducing overall costs.

•BareMetalHardware: The BCF is built with bare metal hardware, disaggregating hardware from software and providing flexibility, vendor choice and significant cost advantage.

•HierarchicalControlPlane: The control plane is an externalized SDN controller with few key functions off-loaded to switches for scale and resiliency. This “hierarchical” implementation of the control plane drives a new level of agility and massive operational simplicity, which cannot be achieved with legacy box-by-box networking.

•Core-and-PodDesign: Each BCF network is deployed as an atomic unit known as a pod, which connects to an existing core. This architecture tremendously simplifies automation, capacity planning, implementation, and enables rapid deployment of new technologies.

Customers are deploying BCF pods for variety of data center use cases, including private cloud, Big Data analytics and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

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Copyright 2014 Big Switch Networks, inc. All rights reserved. Big Switch Networks, Big Cloud Fabric, Big Tap, Switch Light oS, and Switch Light vSwitch are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners. Big Switch Net- works assumes no responsibility for any inaccuracies in this document. Big Switch Networks reserves the right to change, modify, transfer or otherwise revise this publication without notice. BCF Riverbed At a glance V1 oct 2014

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Figure 1: Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager deployed along with the Big Cloud Fabric

hoW The SoLuTioN WoRKSThe Big Cloud Fabric (BCF) is deployed in a pod-based design consisting of Spine and Leaf switches. Within the BCF pod, SteelApp Traffic Manager can be deployed as a dedicated service or as a part of the service chain (see Figure 1). The BCF supports a multi-tenant architecture with the ability to create logical tenants that can span multiple physical racks. As part of this logical architecture, SteelApp Traffic Manager can be configured to load balance either client-server (north-south) traffic coming into the BCF or server-server (east-west) traffic within the BCF. Physically, SteelApp Traffic Manager can be attached to any of the leaf switches in the fabric.

KeY SoLuTioN BeNeFiTSEnterprise customers can realize tremendous benefits in deploying applications and ensuring their performance and availability by deploying SteelApp Traffic Manager in conjunction with the BCF.

•Application-Oriented Control—The multi-tenant design of the BCF enables each tenant to have administrative control over logical L2/L3/policy design. The BCF controller has the intelligence to optimally translate the application-centric logical network design into forwarding tables entries of the physical and virtual switches in the fabric. Inserting SteelApp Traffic Manager into the BCF fabric enables traffic to be load-balanced and prioritized based on application intelligence.

•Rapid Application Agility—The BCF brings agility by leveraging centralized programmability and automation for rapid provisioning of applications. Combined with the ability of the SteelApp Traffic Manager to configure centralized application services and to move application policies with workloads, this joint solution provides unprecedented agility, greater visibility and control over application delivery.

•Flexibility of Deployment and lower TCO—Both BCF and SteelApp Traffic Manager are software-based designs that provide customers hardware choice and flexibility. With pay-as-you-go pricing for SteelApp Traffic Manager and subscription-based licensing for the BCF, customers gain tremendous economic advantage with dramatically lower TCO for deployment and operations.

•Massive Operational Simplification and Scale— One of the significant value propositions of the BCF solution is fabric-wide operational simplification – zero touch installation of Switch Light OS on switches, automated fabric bring up, centralized configuration of tenants & logical routers/segments, seamless insertion of L4-L7 services such as SteelApp Traffic Manager and chaining with other services and fabric-wide rapid upgrade. The operational simplicity of the solution along with the absence of complex networking protocols for centralized forwarding logic enables seamless scale out of spine and leaf switches in the BCF.

In summary, the combination of Riverbed’s state-of-the-art SteelApp Traffic Manager and Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric uniquely leverages hyperscale network design principles with application intelligence to deliver a cost-optimized, application-oriented cloud fabric solution with unmatched resilience, scale and simplicity.

ABouT RiVeRBeDRiverbed Technology, Inc. at more than $1 billion in annual revenue is the leader in Application Performance Infrastructure, delivering the most complete platform for Location-Independent Computing. Location-Independent Computing turns location and distance into a competitive advantage by allowing IT to have the flexibility to host applications and data in the most optimal locations while ensuring applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues are detected and fixed before end users notice. Riverbed’s 25,000+ customers include 97% of the Fortune 100 and 96% of the Forbes Global 100. Learn more at www.riverbed.com.