A sign of how serious organizations see the potential of the emerging software defined networking technology is who is buying into it.
This morning Oracle Corp. said it will buy Corente Inc., which makes a cloud-based service delivery platform for enterprises and service providers that works across wide area networks, connecting public or private clouds.
In essence, it’s solutions virtualize WANs the way LAN software-defined networks virtualize data centres.
Corente CSX allows service providers to manage an unlimited number of independent account and security domains to support their entire service ecosystem. The company says CSX’s policy-defined and enforced abstraction layer creates an intelligent software-defined network that eliminates complex multiple device configurations, allowing customers to provision and manage global private networks connecting to any site, in a secure, centralized and simple manner.
Setting up a global private network takes minutes, the company says.
Oracle already has a virtual networking solution for local area networks that it says dynamically connects servers to storage and networks through software.
“Together, Corente and Oracle are expected to deliver a complete technology portfolio for cloud deployments with SDN offerings that virtualize both the enterprise data center LAN and the WAN, dramatically decreasing time to deployment of services and increasing security and manageability across the enterprise ecosystem,” the Oracle statement said.
“Oracle customers need networking solutions that span their data centers and global networks,” said Edward Screven, Oracle’s [Nasdaq: ORCL] chief corporate architect. “By combining Oracle’s technology portfolio with Corente’s industry leading platform extending software-defined networking to global networks, enterprises will be able to easily and securely deliver applications and cloud services to their globally distributed locations.”
“Corente provides a full lifecycle approach to automating the provisioning and management of service delivery networks,” said Corente CEO Jim Zucco. “Together with Oracle, we expect to deliver software-defined networking offerings that create cost-effective, secure networks, spanning global business ecosystems.”
The companies also said Corente solutions will be let companies connect their data centres to Oracle Cloud and Oracle Public Cloud hosted applications and infrastructure.
Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research said in an interview he was surprised that Oracle went after a company that offers an SDN solution across wide area networks because traditionally Oracle focuses on the data centre. On the other hand, he noted that computing is moving towards a network-centric model. Cicso Systems Inc. — a networking specialist — is building up its compute platform through its UCS servers, he noted, no it makes sense that Oracle is getting deeper into networking.
Corente customers include Illinois Tool Works, British Telecom and Marco Polo New World (a securities trading company). It also partners with Hewlett-Packard, IBM, VMware, Dell, Microsoft and Citrix XenServer.