Broadcom Sets Standard for Network Analytics with BroadView Instrumentation Software

IRVINE, Calif., Nov. 9, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ: BRCM), a global innovation leader in semiconductor solutions for wired and wireless communications, today announced general availability of BroadView™ software, the industry's first and most scalable instrumentation suite for monitoring switch performance. Designed to take advantage of advanced features in the Broadcom StrataXGS^® Trident and Tomahawk™ network switch platforms, BroadView instrumentation software delivers smarter network analytics, enabling operators to optimize network performance across diverse hardware platforms and network operating systems. For more news, visit Broadcom's Newsroom.

In modern mega-scale data center networks, operators monitor large arrays of switch devices to generate a unified view of network performance. With BroadView software, network operators can now leverage an open standard software interface to extract network instrumentation and telemetry data in a consistent manner across multiple vendor platforms. By using a platform-agnostic application programming interface (API) and leveraging open-source reference controller implementations, operators gain deeper visibility into their cloud networks while protecting their investment in existing applications and getting to market faster.

"The rapid innovations in software-defined networking (SDN) instrumentation call for a standardized interface to the switches that comprise the network," said Nick Kucharewski, Broadcom Vice President, Network Switch Marketing. "With an open standard API supported on the most pervasive switch silicon portfolio, Broadcom has established a platform that will enable an open ecosystem of network visibility applications running on a wide range of network equipment."

Broadcom's BroadView instrumentation software has gained broad industry support.  Broadcom is working with service providers, enterprises and cloud providers to support a wider set of use cases and technologies including SDN controllers and orchestrations platforms such as OpenStack.

"ALE, operating under the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise brand, is leveraging Broadcom's BroadView advanced analytics engine to deliver critical functionality for our Application Fluent Network (AFN) strategy," said Stephane Robineau, General Manager and Executive Vice President of ALE Networks. "BroadView software will enable our Intelligent Fabric technology to provide advanced application visibility, troubleshooting and control on the entire network. BroadView software and our AOS (Alcatel-Lucent Operating System) offer a universal and open API in our end-to-end product portfolio accelerating the adoption of SDN in enterprises." 

"With integrated network visibility tools in our SDN fabric solutions, data center operators find it much simpler to manage and troubleshoot their virtualized and cloud environments," said Prashant Gandhi, Vice President of Products and Strategy at Big Switch Networks. "We are excited to partner with Broadcom on BroadView instrumentation software for open networking switches, which will enable us to offer richer, much finer grain network visibility and analytics across both Big Cloud Fabric™ and Big Monitoring Fabric™ solutions."

"BroadView instrumentation is an open source software suite that defines a platform-agnostic API for network monitoring and packet tracing," said Chen Li, SDN Project Manager at China Mobile. "We are planning to develop an SDN application based on Broadcom's BroadView instrumentation software to visualize the real-time traffic and improve the efficiency of network maintenance."

"BroadView instrumentation software delivers unified telemetry APIs supported across Broadcom's industry leading silicon," said William Choe, Vice President, Products and Alliances at Cumulus Networks. "We are partnering with Broadcom to gather network level telemetry in a scalable manner and deliver through standard north bound interfaces, so customers running Cumulus Linux can anticipate network congestions to improve network performance."

"BroadView software represents a significant advancement in providing network administrators with granular information about performance, resource optimization and other useful diagnostic analytics," said Mark Carroll, Chief Technology Officer at HP Networking. "As part of our partnership, we have collaborated with Broadcom to integrate BroadView software into the new OpenSwitch open source network operating system to allow dev/ops teams supporting hyper-scale data centers and hybrid cloud service providers with leading-edge tools to better customize their deployments."

"We are excited to be working with Broadcom to export advanced BroadView software-based metrics," said Peter Phaal, InMon Corp. President. "Exporting metrics using the industry standard sFlow protocol ensures interoperability across the extensive ecosystem of Broadcom-based switches and enhances the visibility of open source and commercial sFlow based monitoring applications."

"Juniper Networks is a strong supporter of open, multi-vendor technologies that drive network insight for our customers," said Bruno Rijsman, Vice President of Architecture at Juniper Networks. "Our latest integration of the BroadView agent with our Broadcom-based QFX Series switches, Cloud Analytics Engine and Contrail Networking provides open mechanisms for our platforms as well as third-party systems to seamlessly gather and visualize network analytics to help our customers make more informed business decisions."

"We believe that a tight collaboration between a network virtualization overlay such as MidoNet, and the underlay, could be beneficial to cloud operators, especially when telemetry data can be shared and analyzed in real-time," said Pino de Candia, Chief Technical Officer at Midokura. "BroadView software-based underlay monitoring, working in conjunction with Linux-enabled networking operating systems, has the potential of providing well-defined SLAs for attributes like quality of service to the overlay."

"The BroadView instrumentation software suite enables a programmable interface that provides visibility into the internals of a switch through an open standard API," said Niraj Jain, Pica8 Vice President of Business Development. "We are integrating BroadView software into PicOS™ to enable our customers to leverage this open source software and optimize their networks built on the industry leading Broadcom silicon portfolio."

"Having a programmable interface to gather telemetry data directly from the agent embedded inside the switch opens new innovation opportunities in network analytics," said Pere Monclus, Chief Technical Officer at PLUMgrid. "With IO Visor as a key in-kernel technology, we are exploring more efficient analytics with Broadcom around uses and opportunities with BroadView standard APIs to offer advanced network monitoring and packet tracing solutions to our customers."

"We see telemetry as one of the networking industry's most significant and untapped opportunities, which is why we have put so much emphasis on it in our software-defined Netvisor offerings," said Sunay Tripathi, Co-Founder of Pluribus Networks. "Visibility into flow level information should be built-in and available throughout the infrastructure. Broadcom shares this vision and their platform-agnostic BroadView interface is a great mechanism to provide it."

"Broadcom's BroadView software delivers innovative network monitoring and packet tracing tools that help ensure optimal network performance," said Hen Haras, General Manager at Xena Networks. "We are very excited to work closely with Broadcom on multiple open projects supported by BroadView software to provide advanced and flexible testing solutions for Ethernet switches in a fast and scalable manner."

Key Features and Benefits

• Leverages unique silicon instrumentation capabilities supported by Trident2 and Tomahawk silicon families
• Threshold based monitoring, buffer statistics tracking and triggers for proactive monitoring and scalability
• Advanced packet tracing tools to improve visibility into traffic flows
• Innovative trouble shooting tools to facilitate easier mapping of overlay flows with underlay links
• Aggregation group resolution to ensure optimal utilization of group members and avoid hash polarization
• Aggregated and abstracted counters as needed by the application
• Open source modular agent with easier customization for adoption in various products and platforms

Availability
Broadcom's BroadView Instrumentation Software Suite is available on Broadcom GitHub.

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About Broadcom
Broadcom Corporation (NASDAQ: BRCM), a FORTUNE 500® company, is a global leader and innovator in semiconductor solutions for wired and wireless communications. Broadcom® products seamlessly deliver voice, video, data and multimedia connectivity in the home, office and mobile environments.  With one of the industry's broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art system-on-a-chip solutions, Broadcom is changing the world by connecting everything®.  For more information, go to www.broadcom.com.

Broadcom®, the pulse logo, Connecting everything®, the Connecting everything logo, BroadView™, StrataXGS® and Tomahawk™ are among the trademarks of Broadcom Corporation and/or its affiliates in the United States, certain other countries and/or the EU.  Any other trademarks or trade names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

Contacts

SOURCE Broadcom Corporation; BRCM Infrastructure