Dell have released their new Open Networking operating system OS10, and Justin has a chat with Jeff Baher, Executive Director, Product Marketing, Dell Networking.
Jeff Baher, Executive Director, Product/Solutions/Marketing, Dell Networking
They talk about the trend in networking to decouple software from hardware, and why it appeals to certain organisations. In essence, it helps automate another part of the infrastructure stack when you’re doing rapid software development and deployment in a multi-tenant, scale-out fashion.

Imagine being able to buy your switch hardware from one vendor (your choice) and then buy the switch operating system from someone else (again, your choice) instead of having to use the switch vendor’s software on their hardware. It’s a lot more like buying an x86 server and running whatever hypervisor or operating system you choose on it.
And then contrast that again with the move towards consolidation of CPU and storage in hyper-converged infrastructure, but with software based network overlays like VMware’s NSX running on it. Clearly there are some big changes happening in the data-centres of the world right now.
Links

* Justin’s piece at Forbes.com about the announcement.
* The Dell OS 10 product page.
* The Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) part of the Open Compute Project.
* A Dell blog post about SAI.
* A Microsoft blog post about SAI.
* A link to the actual spec for the Switch Abstraction Interface, via the Open Compute website.
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Sponsors

This episode of The Eigencast was sponsored by PivotNine IT Consultants and Advisors.