NEC UNIVERGE ProgrammableFlow PF5820 10/40GbE OpenFlow Switch Added to Product Line

December 28, 2011

UNIVERGE ProgrammableFlow PF5820 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) OpenFlow switch provides a high throughput, low latency and energy-efficient hardware design that delivers 1.28 Terabits of switching performance designed for building high-performance, secure and programmable networks.

The PF5820 is an extension of NEC's ProgrammableFlow Software Defined Network Architecture (SDN), which includes the NEC ProgrammableFlow Controller and PF5240 1/10 GbE Switch. SDN has the potential to revolutionize the network industry by allowing network operators to develop network services independent from network equipment. ProgrammableFlow leverages SDN to help eliminate the complexity of traditional network design, speeding innovation while dramatically reducing network operations cost.

The Network Development and Deployment Initiative (NDDI), a partnership between Internet2, Indiana University and the Clean Slate Program at Stanford University, is using NEC ProgrammableFlow to aid in its goal of building a network platform that supports revolutionary global scientific research. NDDI has deployed the first OpenFlow software defined network in production, called The Open Science, Scholarship and Services Exchange (OS3E).

"Internet2's success in deploying NEC OpenFlow switches for research networks made NEC a natural candidate for the OS3E production network," said Matt Davy, co-director of the Internet2 NDDI program and Chief Architect for Indiana University. "The NEC PF5820 met all of our evaluation objectives and the initial deployment with ProgrammableFlow has gone well - completely as expected."

Available today, the PF5820 provides 48 10GbE SFP+ ports plus 4 QSFP+ ports that operate at 40GbE or as 16 additional 10GbE ports providing a total of 64 10GbE ports in one switch. Built for reliability, the PF5820 design includes optional front-to-back or back-to-front airflow, redundant, hot-swappable AC power supplies, the PF5240 supports the OpenFlow 1.0 specification and will support new versions of the OpenFlow standard as they become available.

"OpenFlow gives customers an option to simplify their networks while keeping them flexible to be able to respond to changing business and application needs," said Rohit Mehra, Director, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure, IDC. "Leveraging OpenFlow with ProgrammableFlow allows IT and network managers to look beyond traditional, static networks with an open architecture approach- making them dynamic while simplifying management, control and configuration of network devices."

"As part of the ProgrammableFlow Network Fabric, PF5820 10GbE streamlines operations, lowers power consumption and requires less rack space to achieve higher performance rates verses traditional network designs," said Don Clark, Director of Business Development, IT Platform Group, NEC Corporation of America. "It empowers customers to create scale-out network designs and yields improved network operations and eases ongoing maintenance."

"NDDI deployment of NEC's ProgrammableFlow Switches exemplifies the incredible innovation and value customers can achieve with this new architecture," continued Clark. "ProgrammableFlow deployments are growing rapidly and the PF5820 builds on this legacy to further offer high performance and low latency to meet the demands of dynamic organizations today."