Kaloom delivers fully automated, programmable data center fabric

Kaloom announced the general availability of its Software Defined Fabric (SDF) product family. Kaloom was founded with the vision of providing the automated and programmable data center networking fabric, one that will disrupt how data centers are built and managed by cloud providers, telcos and enterprises.

Beta customers have turned to Kaloom for increased automation and feature velocity while reducing network latency, costs and time to introduce new services and features.

Kaloom’s SDF leverages open networking white boxes in order to reduce CAPEX while its automation features reduce OPEX and minimize time to deployment and configuration errors.

The P4-based programming capabilities of the fabric future-proofs network investments compared to slower, more costly merchant silicon product cycles. By offloading data plane functions from virtual machines and containers, Kaloom’s SDF delivers an increase of up to 2x in throughput with a 7x reduction in latency, improving overall networking efficiency by a factor of 5-10x.

“The general availability of the SDF is a great achievement by our team. Our product has been tested by several beta customers, which require lower-latency solutions, and it was very well received,” said Laurent Marchand, CEO of Kaloom. “Since founding Kaloom, our goal has been to deliver the most automated, programmable and scalable data center networking fabric at the lowest cost in the industry and we’re proud to say that we’ve exceeded that goal.”

Kaloom offers interfaces to industry standard orchestration systems and SDN controllers such as Openstack (ML2), Kubernetes (CNI) and OpenDaylight (NETCONF). Kaloom’s SDF offers a pre-tested and certified software solution for white boxes from Accton, Delta and Foxconn that is designed for hyperscale and distributed data center environments.

Kaloom drives innovation, enables all-layer data center automation

The SDF’s programmable fabric enables developers to drive innovation; and customers can add new services and features to the Kaloom SDF. The architecture provides a multi-data center fabric designed to satisfy the current and future challenges of increasing network workload demands at scale.

The SDF is a fully containerized networking fabric that improves scale and the overall performance of container networking. SDF is integrated into well-known orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes using Container Networking Interface (CNI), and OpenStack using Neutron modular layer 2 (ML2) plugins.

The days of managing complex and error-prone configuration files and scripts are over as Kaloom brings all-layer automation to the data center networking space. The Kaloom SDF has self-forming and self-discovery capabilities, as well as zero-touch provisioning of the virtual network and virtual components with automated software upgrades. As a result, human intervention is minimized, thus saving time, effort and errors. Network provisioning time is reduced from several days to minutes, and the network is updated during runtime.

The Kaloom SDF has been designed to virtualize the data center. A physical data center can be partitioned into multiple independent and isolated virtual data centers (vDCs). Each vDC operates with its own Virtual Fabric (vFabric), which can host millions of IPv4 or IPv6 based tenant networks.

Additional compute and storage resources can be dynamically assigned or removed from a vDC through the associated vFabric, thus creating a flexible and elastic pool of network resources suitable for network slicing.

Kaloom’s business model for data center owners, offers a “pay-as-you-grow” subscription license. Customers pay only for the active number of customer-facing ports, thereby simplifying deployments, decreasing costs and improving forecasting. In the network, the solution leverages low-cost open networking white boxes, thus eliminating the need for expensive physical appliances.

The Kaloom Software Defined Product Family consists of the following components:

• Kaloom Software Defined Fabric,
• Kaloom vRouter,
• Kaloom vSwitch,
• Kaloom vGW (virtual gateway).

“Software defined and virtual architectures are key enablers for organizations looking to transform their network and are driving the next wave of network investment,” said Bob Laliberte, practice director and senior analyst for networking at Enterprise Strategy Group.

“Organizations will require higher levels of network automation and programmability to meet the rigorous demands of highly dynamic environments. Additionally, telcos, hyperscalers and multi-data center enterprises are looking to deploy modern, container-based solutions to optimize networking and computing resources. Kaloom’s SDF is focused on, and takes advantage of, these key emerging trends.”