Embrane®, the leader in software-defined network (SDN) services, today announced a new release of its flagship network services platform, heleos®, with new features enabling application-centric networking. The latest version of heleos includes unique technologies that allow customers to create Virtual Topologies (vTopologies) dedicated to specific enterprise applications. Additional functionality includes the ability to interconnect hybrid cloud environments and perform network service insertion and chaining. Embrane also introduced several new enterprise-class features, as well as a plugin for OpenStack Neutron.
“Much of the SDN discussion in the industry to date has been focused on the wrong problems,” said Dante Malagrinò, co-founder, president and CEO of Embrane. “The real issue for customers is finding ways to deploy applications faster and they know that the bottleneck is the network. Our application-centric networking solutions enable customers to address that problem while maintaining operational consistency with the way networks and systems are managed today. Embrane empowers network teams to deliver the agility that modern IT organizations require.”
“ESG research revealed that the top network challenge (indicated by 44 percent of respondents) when rolling out new applications was the length of time to provision network services,” stated Bob Laliberte, ESG. “In fact, a third of the respondents indicated that it still required three or more months to fully roll out a new application. These data points reveal a pressing need for solutions, like Embrane, that can help organizations accelerate the time to provision new network services.”
Embrane was founded with the idea that the network needed to become much more agile to support the growing demand for faster application development and deployment. With the new release of heleos, the company continues to deliver real networking solutions focused on applications. This application-centric approach to networking gives enterprises greater agility while lowering risk by dedicating virtual network services to an application, throughout its lifecycle, from creation to retirement. Embrane heleos enables enterprises to create software-defined network services in seconds; tie them together via Virtual Links (vLinks); and simplify policy management.
“The ability to deploy software-defined firewalls and VPNs using Embrane’s vision and approach to application-centric networking is in line with our long-term goal for our agile data center,” said Sean McShea, president of Ryan Labs Asset Management, a multi-billion dollar asset management company. “For Ryan Labs, we ultimately want to be able to dedicate network services directly to our applications so we can get them to our traders, analysts and clients with increased security and lower costs.”
With this latest version of heleos, Embrane introduces vTopologies – Layer 3 overlay networks – that provide greatly increased agility, scalability and isolation in enterprise and service provider data centers. Among the many advantages of vTopologies is the ability to completely mask internal IP addressing from the underlay network. By virtualizing the network in this manner, enterprises can benefit from application isolation and dramatically simplified IP address management while service providers can easily and cost-effectively support multi-tenancy and customer-provided IP addressing.
New Enterprise Features
In addition to vTopologies and vLinks, Embrane also introduced several additional features that enable enterprises to benefit from network agility. New enhancements include:
- ESM Projects – administratively isolated environments that users can use to build and deploy heleos-powered network services and vTopologies.
- OpenStack Neutron Plugin – a plugin that allows the seamless provisioning and insertion of Embrane software-defined network services via OpenStack Horizon and OpenStack Neutron
- Interoperability with VMware vCenter – Allows heleos-powered network services to easily be used to service workloads created by VMware vCloud Director
- IPv6 Support – support for both IPv4 and IPv6 to help customers enable IPv6 without disrupting the IPv4 network
heleos UI – Reduces the time to provision, configure, and maintain network services - Support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) – enables heleos-powered network services to bypass the virtual switch for greater performance and density.
About Embrane
Based in Silicon Valley, Embrane is the leader in layer 3-7 software-defined network services for enterprise and service providers. Embrane’s solutions are delivered via a multi-service software architecture designed to provision and scale on-demand from a single point of management.