Press Releases
2008
FORCE10 ADDRESSES MARKET NEED FOR SUPERIOR NETWORK AGILITY, FLEXIBILITY AND EFFICIENCY WITH VIRTUALVIEW OPTIMIZATION TOOLS
SAN JOSE, Calif., November 3, 2008 – Force10 Networks®, the pioneer in building and securing reliable networks, today introduced its VirtualView™ traffic management and provisioning technology. A set of standards-based software tools enabled through the company’s industry leading modular operating system, FTOS, VirtualView provides real-time network traffic analysis and management designed to facilitate troubleshooting and benchmarking performance in virtualized environments. Available across the versatile Force10 switch/router product portfolio, VirtualView delivers core-to-edge network visibility through data sampling, and subsequent analysis by a wide range of third-party tools and automated monitoring mechanisms designed to establish both baseline and ongoing application performance statistics.
More than ever, CIOs and data center managers are striving to maximize network performance and minimize infrastructure and management costs. Data centers are also facing server sprawl and the difficulty it creates for effectively managing these growing and increasingly complex environments. To gain an upper hand on consolidating their infrastructure, businesses are turning to virtualization technology, and while this strategy may be resourceful, network administrators are finding it difficult to manage and diagnose specific application or infrastructure behavior. The VirtualView technology was created based on the premise that a network infrastructure must be able to automate network behavior, while ensuring the flexibility required to both co-exist and contribute to the virtualized data center environment.
“Virtualized network environments are demonstrating value and continue to show even greater potential for businesses that require flexibility and efficiency in their data center,” said Stephen Garrison, vice president of marketing at Force10 Networks. “VirtualView helps realize that potential by lowering network TCO through faster virtual machine deployment and enhanced monitoring that fosters greater flexibility to respond to changing application requirements and network conditions.”
Standard Feature within Force10 Operating System
VirtualView is offered as part of FTOS, which is built on a modular NetBSD kernel and modular Unix-like operating system. The combined architecture of Force10 hardware and FTOS helps customers build high-performance virtualized networks. In addition, a hardware abstraction layer is used to make applications, such as VirtualView, portable across Force10 product lines – eliminating any rewrites of the application software for each platform. This modularity is extended into FTOS’s industry-standard command line interface (CLI), which gives administrators new to implementing Force10 solutions the ability to quickly deploy the devices with minimal training.
Once baseline and on-going application performance on virtualized environments are established using VirtualView, administrators can enforce and monitor service level agreements and offer high-touch services on virtual machines (VM). In doing so, administrators are able to guarantee bandwidth per application or VM and have enhanced capability to monitor data center networks for malicious traffic and DoS attacks.
Future Enhancements: Visualizing and Automating the Network Fabric
In line with its commitment to tracking and responding to evolving networking requirements, Force10 is focusing on new developments in automation management and other related functions, and will leverage FTOS to respond to these trends.
“Ongoing trends in network optimization have prompted storage and server companies to investigate automation functions as a means of powering down idle servers and storage arrays during low-usage times, in addition to load-balancing traffic among the remaining systems,” said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of Yankee Group's Enterprise Research group. “Similar developments in the networking arena are expected to lead to the automation of network tasks using secure policy servers, and future business requirements could require security and quality of service policies that are activated on a scheduled or timed basis, triggering the appropriate configuration of network devices. Such automation would streamline device configuration, reducing human errors and lowering operations overhead. The robust FTOS architecture and XML interface lay the foundation for such automation.”
The Force10 Reliable Networking™ product portfolio supports advances in reliability, network control and scalability that enable enterprises to lower their total cost of ownership. By building a flexible network that is ready to support emerging and evolving applications, enterprises can optimize their networks for current needs as well as future requirements.
About Force10 Networks
Force10 Networks develops high-performance data center solutions powered by the industry’s most innovative line of open, standards-based, networking hardware and software. The company’s Open Cloud Networking framework grants Web 2.0/portal operators, cloud and hosting providers, enterprise and special-purpose data center customers new levels of flexibility, performance, scale and automation—fundamentally changing the economics of data center networking. Force10 Networks operates globally, providing 24x7 service and support to its customer base in more than 60 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.force10networks.com.
Contact:
Michael Schoolnik
StoryPR on behalf of Force10 Networks Inc.
+1 415-674-3816
michael@storypr.com
Force10 Networks, the Force10 Networks logo, Force10, E-Series, Traverse, and TraverseEdge are registered trademarks and Open Cloud Networking, Z-Series, ZettaScale, ExaScale, S-Series, TeraScale, FTOS, Open Automation, are trademarks of Force10 Networks, Inc. All other company names are trademarks of their respective holders.
