Dell Expands Open Networking Initiative To Include Midokura

Dell on Monday announced an expansion of its Open Networking initiative to include Midokura, a global company focused on network virtualization, to complement Dell’s networking and server infrastructure. This agreement includes a joint go-to-market program, validated reference architecture and global reseller agreement.

The announcement offers Midokura’s Enterprise MidoNet software on Dell infrastructure, delivering a network virtualization overlay for OpenStack that helps enterprise customers and service providers create an agile cloud networking infrastructure based on open technologies. As the industry increasingly moves to disaggregate hardware from software, customers require a variety of open technologies to complete this vision. Dell’s open networking switches and industry-standard x86 servers form the foundation of many modern data centres.

“What this shows is that we’re actively connecting the dots with like-minded companies to upend the traditional, black-box model of networking,” said Tom Burns, Vice President and general manager, Dell Networking. “That old model is too rigid, too locked and too slow to innovate. Dell’s Open Networking initiative is about being open, flexible and software-defined to help maximise our customers’ application environments.”

“Midokura, like Dell, is committed to expanding the Open Networking initiative to meet the needs of today’s modern enterprises and help deliver an open foundation for compute, storage and networking infrastructure,” said Dan Mihai Dumitriu, CEO and Co-Founder, Midokura. “We’ve already successfully teamed up with Dell to bridge virtual and physical networks and we look forward to deepening our collaboration to create an open, converged infrastructure for enterprises to support clouds that are easy to scale and operate.”

MidoNet is a software-based, highly-distributed network virtualization system that allows service providers and enterprises to build, run and manage virtual networks with increased control and flexibility. Leveraging industry standards and existing infrastructure, MidoNet provides network agility and scalability while helping reduce costs.

Dell and Cumulus Networks announced a partnership in January 2014. Together, they provide customers data centre networking solutions that enable affordable capacity and operational efficiency. Now, with Dell Open Networking switches, the Cumulus® Linux® operating system and MidoNet, Dell offers comprehensive network virtualization solutions for the software-defined data centre.

As companies of all sizes shift to a software-centric operation, Cumulus Linux plays a critical role as an operating system for open networking - making it simpler and more affordable to build, manage and automate modern data centres.

The Dell, Cumulus Networks and Midokura solution enables a growing number of service providers and enterprise customers to provision scalable virtual networks to connect to physical workloads in a matter of minutes. Midokura MidoNet leverages Dell switches to facilitate network traffic flows from virtual machines to non-virtualized, physical workloads such as high-performance databases, email servers and legacy systems at line rate.