Huawei stabs at a software defined networking (SDN) switch market dominated by Cisco and reveals the S12700 Agile switch series-- two products promising the most programmable and flexible ethernet switches yet.
The switches (S12708 and S12712) feature the Huawei Ethernet Network Processor (ENP), a chip the company says is more easy to program than the application-specific integrated circuits (ASICS) inside most Cisco switches.
The EPN accommodates next-generation protocols and virtualisation methods, including Virtual Extensible LAN (vxLAN) and Network Virtualisation using Generic Routing Encapsulation (nvGRE), and reduces power consumptions and service deployment times.
Meanwhile the Huawei Versatile Routing Platform (VRP) provides high-performance L2/L3 switching together with services such as MPLS VPN, hardware IPv6, desktop cloud and video conferencing.
The S12700 Agile switches should start shipping by Q1 2012
