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Cato SD-WAN adds 'self-healing' capabilities to product portfolio
Cato Networks hones Cato SD-WAN with 'self-healing' features designed to fight against network failures. Also, Kaloom unveils Software Defined Fabric to improve data center programmability.
Cato Networks has updated its Cato Cloud SD-WAN with "self-healing" capabilities to better protect enterprises from network outages and failures. Cato also introduced a new data center appliance that supports Cato SD-WAN and protects against component failures.
With the upgrade, Cato SD-WAN as a service can now automatically handle edge device and network transport failure, fail over to disaster recovery sites and move apps between data centers or cloud providers in the event of a service disruption, according to a Cato statement. By adding self-healing to Cato SD-WAN, Cato said it hopes to deliver end-to-end high availability and simplify how customers respond to various network failures.
The Cato SD-WAN update also includes what Cato calls "follow-the-network" security rules, which eliminate the need for IT teams to manually update firewall and other network policies.
"Cato's self-healing algorithms use enhanced BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] capabilities to detect new IP ranges and automatically update all relevant policies for zero-touch service continuity," Cato said in a statement.
The rackable data center appliance -- designated as the X1700 Socket -- is designed for large data centers and comes with redundant power supplies and hot swappable hard drives, Cato said. Cato Socket appliances use encrypted tunnels to automatically connect to nearby Cato points of presence within Cato's global network.
Kaloom unveils Software Defined Fabric
Kaloom, a data center networking startup based in Montreal, announced this week the availability of its programmable Software Defined Fabric. The fabric aims to improve programmability and automation in the data center.
Kaloom's Software Defined Fabric comprises four main components: the software-defined fabric, along with a virtual router, a virtual switch and a virtual gateway. These come embedded into the software-defined fabric and can be service chained along with other virtual functions, according to a company statement.
A customer can use Kaloom's fabric to partition -- or slice -- its data center into multiple independent virtual data centers, each of which operates with its own virtual fabric, Kaloom said. These virtual data centers have the capability to host multiple tenant networks, while offloading data plane functions to help improve network efficiency, the company said.
Kaloom's fabric integrates with OpenStack, Kubernetes and OpenDaylight, using the Neutron Modular Layer 2 plugin, the Container Network Interface and the NETCONF interface, respectively. The fabric also supports the P4 programming language, which allows customization in the data plane, Kaloom said. Kaloom's fabric is certified to run on white boxes from Accton, Delta and Foxconn.
Kaloom Software Defined Fabric is available now through a pay-as-you-grow subscription license, in which customers pay for the active number of customer-facing ports. Kaloom's primary customers include data center and telecommunication operators, enterprises and gaming companies.
Also this week, Kaloom tapped Mbuzz to market, distribute and support Software Defined Fabric to customers in the Middle East and Europe.
