Big Switch Takes the Fast Path to Hybrid Cloud Via On-Prem VPCs

Big Switch Networks will help enterprises set up virtual private clouds (VPCs) in their on-premises data centers, modeling the VPCs they use in the big public clouds. Big Switch is doing this to make it easy for enterprises to adopt hybrid cloud. When businesses set up their accounts with the major public cloud providers, they create VPCs. For Amazon Web Services (AWS) it’s called AWS VPC; for Microsoft it’s Azure vNet; and for Google it’s Google Cloud Platform VPC. Today, Big Switch announced its intention to bring “VPC everywhere” to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption. Kyle Forster, founder of Big Switch Networks, said the company wants to take the best of cloud networking and bring that on premises. It’s starting with VPC because “It’s the single biggest configuration that everything else hangs off of,” said Forster. “I think we’re the only ones taking this first step. We think it’s the fastest path to hybrid cloud.” Big Switch’s technology is based on software-defined networking (SDN). Its VPC for on-premises is a logical Layer 2/Layer 3 network that users provision on top of the cloud. “The model is really well-thought-through for an as-a-service cloud culture,” said Forster. Hybrid Cloud Approaches: The “hybrid-cloud” topic has been hot for the past year. And different vendors are taking various approaches. Both Cisco and Arista have announced hybrid cloud strategies to bridge their on-premises environments to public clouds. In August 2017, Cisco said it was making it easier for its customers that use its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) in their private data centers to connect that infrastructure to public clouds. In cloud-native circles, Cisco’s approach has been disparaged as a virtual hardware (vHardware) tactic, where engineers use the same CLIs for both their on-premises and cloud workloads. In September 2017, Arista Networks rolled out its Any Cloud software platform designed for enterprises to extend their workloads across private data centers and public clouds.