Pica8, a leading provider of software defined networking (SDN) white box, last week announced that the company will support Labeled BGP on bare-metal, white box switches. Labeled BGP is a signaling mechanism carriers can use to create MPLS paths, a function that is currently available in expensive edge routers from the likes of Cisco and Juniper. The new capability is part of Pica8’s newest software release PicOS 2.6 aimed at driving implementation of network overlay with a solution driven by service providers.
Paul Parker-Johnson, ACG Research
Service providers have used overlay technologies for decades, and have developed a rich mix of services using BGP and MPLS within their own networks and between their networks and those of their peers. They will naturally prefer to use familiar technology to offer more flexible data center-to-data center and customer-facing VPN services, while taking advantage of white box economics and the flexible traffic handling enabled by SDN within their data centers. Pica8 is leveraging these strong preferences and disrupting network economics by being the first to port Labeled BGP to their white box enabled network OS.
Olivier Vautrin, Head of Product Management, Pica8
We are seeing a real debate in the “how” of offering end-to-end services inside and between data centers. The need is real if you want to deploy hybrid cloud services and to accomplish that, you need a flexible and proven encapsulation technology. We believe MPLS and Labeled BGP offers that opportunity and the experience in the market is there. Once MPLS is used in the data center, complex stitching technologies between data center and WAN encapsulations are not needed anymore. This is disrupting traditional data center edge devices by adding this functionality into our hardware-agnostic white box switching OS.
