It was just announced Riverbed will be acquiring OPNET. With the growth of BYOD, Cloud, SDN, and Collaboration just to name a few of today’s hottest trends, it is now more important than ever before to have deeper visibility into both the network and the applications riding over the network. For the mid-size Enterprise in my experience, they usually rely just on SNMP, WMI, and sometimes NetFlow to gain visibility to the network. However, this data on its own is not enough to really know what’s going on throughout the network. From my perspective, network and application performance management (APM) solutions are those that the incumbent network vendors should have been selling for the past decade. These are what’s really needed. How can you make a better network or make applications run smoother if there isn’t direct integration between the network and the applications (via an APM tool)?
With regards to SDN, I still truly believe as I originally said almost a year ago, a key application for SDN can be a direct integration between a SDN controller and APM tools such as those offered by OPNET, now Riverbed. From what I understand, OPNET took part at the Interop Lab last year in Vegas with the focus being the OpenFlow protocol. There is clear direction to be able to understand the protocol, but it doesn’t look like they ever joined the ONF based on the recent member list. However, with that said, Riverbed is on the ONF, so with the two companies now becoming one, I do hope there is traction around debugging and monitoring OpenFlow, as well as with integrating their tools within the greater SDN ecosystem. On top of that, it could mean greater visibility into the overlays and tunnels such as STT, VXLAN, and NV-GRE. Riverbed has already talked about that in recent weeks.
One logical choice given the state of the market would be integrating with Big Switch. They’ve already partnered with over a half of a dozen sofware/hardware vendors for OpenFlow support, so we know they are open and need to live off these types of partnerships to succeed. Maybe a Riverbed partnership for Big Switch can be an integration on the northbound side, the important side, of the SDN controller. As always, we’ll have to wait and see what happens though.
One logical choice given the state of the market would be integrating with Big Switch. They’ve already partnered with over a half of a dozen sofware/hardware vendors for OpenFlow support, so we know they are open and need to live off these types of partnerships to succeed. Maybe a Riverbed partnership for Big Switch can be an integration on the northbound side, the important side, of the SDN controller. As always, we’ll have to wait and see what happens though.
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