Network virtualization poised on the brink of big things, Big Switch co-founder says (video)

Earlier this year, VentureBeat sat down with Kyle Forster, the co-founder of Big Switch Networks, to talk about network virtualization, a key cloud technology.

The company’s technology is built on OpenFlow, a platform for network virtualization that gives network administrators more control over the behavior of network devices, such as routers and switches.

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“We like to think of our company as a VMware for networks,” Forster says.

Big Switch’s software can make it so that people sharing the same physical network never see one another’s traffic — it looks to each one as if they’ve got exclusive access to the same 24-port switch, for example.

It also enables companies to virtually integrate multiple data centers, often widely separated by geography, so that it looks like they’re all sitting on one big switch — thus the company’s name.

The market for network switching is $16 billion, Forster says. Because equipment quickly goes out of date, networking virtualization technologies let companies adapt more quickly.

“We’ll see a whole OpenFlow ecosystem come together. I think the next few quarters are going to be a very interesting time,” Forster said.

The video was conducted by Matthew Lynley, who until earlier this year was a writer with VentureBeat.

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