Today, the industry officially welcomed another start up to the SDN world – Pica8. I’ve been following these guys for a while as they posted on their blog and before their merger with Pronto. At one point over a year ago, I even inquired about purchasing a Pronto Switch, but never pulled the trigger. Check out the original Pronto Systems web site here for more background and history on their solution, products, and testing.
Pica8 + Open vSwitch
In my last blog, I talked about Cisco’s Nexus 1000V, VMware’s VSS/VDS, and the Open vSwitch (OVS) as the three most deployed solutions for L2 virtual networking in the hypervisor. One interesting fact here is that Open vSwitch can actually run as the control stack on a hardware switch as well. Interesting? Definitely – considering the majority of conversations around SDN have focused around data center network virtualization.