Oracle finds a port in the SDN/NFV storm with two new ethernet switches

Who said Ethernet was dull? Oracle certainly doesn't: it's floated a couple of switches down the slipway and off into the oceans of the data centre.

It's nearly refreshing to have something as vanilla as an Ethernet switch, sorry two Ethernet switches, announced among all the foam emitted by aspirant supplanters of the handful-of-billion-dollar wrist-watch smart-watch market.

In case you were in danger of forgetting what you were buying when you called, the Ethernet switches go by the self-explanatory designations ES2.

The ES2-72 can pack in 72 10 Gbps Ethernet ports, or 18 ports at 40 Gbps. The companion ES2-64 has 40 10GbaseT ports and either six 40 Gbps Ethernet or 24 Gbps Ethernet ports.

You're probably breathless for just a little more detail, so here it is: the switches are also compatible with Big Red's Netra Modular system, a late February launch that forms part of the company's network function virtualisation (NFV) play.

(Oracle's familiarity with the iron market seems to be waning, since it claims market-leading capabilities like “the first integrated platform to merge traditional blade and rackmount architectures” with networking and storage, something El Reg is certain we've seen more than once in the last decade).

The NFV angle for Netra Modular comes via Oracle's SDN and OpenStack support, with Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris and Oracle VM support.

The hopelessly sentimental will get SPARC support on Netra Modular in 2016.

Of at least equal interest is another MWC announcement, that the company is adding new virtual network services to Oracle SDN, so that InfiniBand and Ethernet fabrics can present as a single network under Oracle Fabric Manager.

Telco-land has its own peculiar demands, so selling standalone switches into tat market may not align with Oracle's oft-repeated insistence that hyper-engineered stacks-in-a-box, at low prices are what makes IT hum. But if the company can shift some kit, nobody will mind that it's going a bit off-message. ®

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