Website pica8.com Type of business Private | Founded 2009 | |
 | ||
Industry Cloud Networking, Networking hardware Key people James Liao, CEO & co-founder
Lin Du, VP of Engineering & co-founder
Niraj Jain, VP of Business Products Software, network switches Headquarters Palo Alto, California, United States | ||
James liao pica8 ocp summit ocpsummit16 thecube
Pica8, Inc. is a computer networking company headquartered in Palo Alto, California, United States. Pica8 is a vendor of operating systems on white box network switches delivering software-defined networking (SDN) solutions for datacenter and cloud computing environments. The company's products include Linux-based OpenFlow-supporting switching operating system PicOS, which is shipped either as standalone software or pre-loaded onto a range of 1/10/40 Gigabit Ethernet switches based on commoditized ("white box") switches purchased from original design manufacturers (ODMs).
Contents
- James liao pica8 ocp summit ocpsummit16 thecube
- History
- PicOS
- Switches
- CrossFlow
- Awards and recognitions
- References
The company's approach is to combine commodity network hardware (from manufacturers like Accton, Foxconn, Quanta) with Debian Linux, OpenFlow controller and Open vSwitch (OVS) to create more "democratic" SDN solutions with competitive price compared to conventional embedded switches.
History
The company was founded in 2009. It launched a family of OpenFlow-enabled Ethernet switches in August 2009 and has been selling products ever since.
In 2010, Pica8 was selling 48-port gigabit Ethernet and 10-gigabit Ethernet switches at half the price of comparable products of Force10 and Arista Networks. It achieved such result through combining open source software with merchant ASICs (from companies like Broadcom, Marvell, and Intel/Fulcrum) on switches from "white-box vendors".
In July 2011, Pica8 added support for the open source "Indigo" OpenFlow stack from Big Switch Networks to its switches as an alternative stack. In November 2011 it embedded Open vSwitch (OVS), developed by Nicira, into its operation system PicOS to enable more sophisticated network management from inside the switch.
In October 2012 Pica8 raised $6.6m in Series A funding from VantagePoint Capital Partners to support its sales and product development. On 10 December 2012 the company exited stealth mode with introduction of SDN reference architecture aimed at cloud providers.
By 2013, among about 100 Pica8's customers, including large service providers and hosting companies, were such companies as Baidu, Yahoo! Japan and NTT Communications.
In December 2013, the company launched the Pica8 SDN Starter Kit, an "out-of-the-box" kit that includes an open-source network controller, a programmable network tap, an open-source network intrusion detection system, and other components meant to give customers a complete SDN solution, which would be quick to implement.
In April 2014 Pica8 claimed to be the first vendor to support the latest version 1.4 of OpenFlow and to have over 300 customers globally.
PicOS
The PicOS (formerly known as XorPlus) is a switch operating system that Pica8 has developed based on XORP, an eXtensible Open Router Platform. The operation system works on Linux kernel and is extended with network and switching services.
PicOS includes a traditional Layer-2 / Layer-3 switching mode (L2/L3 Mode) and has support for OpenFlow protocol, standardized by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), through Open vSwitch (OVS). OVS runs as a process on the Debian Linux distribution.
Additionally, PicOS has a hardware abstraction layer that lets it run atop networking ASICs of various makers. Therefore, the operating system can be unaware ("agnostic") about the underlying hardware and not tied to it.
Switches
Pica8 offers PicOS to customers in two ways. Either as standalone software or pre-installed on hardware switches. Below is a list of switches offered by Pica8:
CrossFlow
On 10 November 2014 Pica8 announced CrossFlow Networking, a new feature in the PicOS bare metal switch OS that enables network managers to integrate OpenFlow applications and business policies with existing layer 2/layer 3 networks. Users can run layer 2/layer 3 protocols and OpenFlow protocols on the same switch at the same time. OpenFlow can be used for policy-driven applications to bring business logic to the network. The traditional network can optimize packet transport and performance with protocols, such as OSPF, Spanning Tree, and BGP.