Big Switch Networks has just landed $25 million to help it take on such giants as Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, and Juniper Networks in the network virtualization space.
The round was led by Redpoint Ventures and joined by Goldman Sachs, and existing investors Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others. It brings the company’s total investment to $39 million.
“The Redpoint team has been looking at data center architectures for a good while now – and we’ve been particularly focused on the open opportunity to address the limitations of networking architecture,” said Satish Dharmaraj, General Partner at Redpoint Ventures. “Big Switch’s open ecosystem approach and its brilliant team have created a breakthrough disruption at the right moment – and we’re very proud to participate in supporting their vision.”
The company provides network flexibility by allowing multiple networks to act as a single network, thus providing better network control of such devices as routers and switches. The platform is highly scalable and designed to address businesses’ limits on virtual and physical infrastructure by providing virtual overlays between hypervisor-based switches as well as OpenFlow switches, thus offering end-to-end network virtualization. Its API is 100 percent compatible with Floodlight, the only Apache-licensed SDN controller, so its supported by a large ecosystem of applications. Its technology allows businesses to change networks and data centers without expensive hardware upgrades.
Founded in 2010 and based in Palo Alto, the company will use the new funding to expand engineering, sales and marketing teams to ramp up its market.
“We started this revolutionary trend away from closed and proprietary systems, and are gratified that every major physical and virtual infrastructure vendor is now participating,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks. “Working with our ecosystem of partners, the Big Switch platform will disrupt networking applications as we know them today.”