Abiquo adds CohesiveFT’s SDN

One of the important capabilities of the cloud is its ability to create collaborative services that allow users to build services that closely match their specific requirements. This capability extends from building collaboration between single function applications through to large systems and service management tools that then, in turn, become service development, deployment and management envitonments.

It is the latter which is the target behind the coming together of cloud management platform vendor, Abiquo, and CohesiveFT’s VNS3 Software Defined Networking (SDN). Abiquo has added fhe CohesiveFT SDN product to its cloud solution portfolio in order to offer its cloud tenants a new and easy way to create secure networks between their private, hosted virtual datacentres and public cloud infrastructures.

The integration of VNS3 with Abiquo’s platform also allows users to control SDN capabilities, and provide flexibility and additional security within the rigour and management of the service provider’s standard offers.

The combination offers users benefits such as easily created SDNs that span their Abiquo-managed private, hosted or public clouds, allowing widely distributed applications. It also allows them to create an SDN firewall by using the VNS3 Manager to selectively permit outbound traffic to the Internet while guarding inbound traffic from external parties.

Secure data in motion is possible using end-to-end encryption across the SDN, while users can now exploit enterprise protocols and monitoring systems, such as UDP multicast and SNMP, across multiple cloud and dedicated platforms.

VNS3 user-controlled network capabilities also offer Abiquo customers the ability to control IP addresses, use normally unsupported protocols, and offer broader end-to-end data encryption.

Ian Finlay, VP of Products at Abiquo, said, “Our global customers can now use VNS3 combined with our IaaS offering to solve common use cases such as securely connecting data centres to cloud application deployments, encrypting data-in-motion within and between virtual data centres, complying with security standards such as HIPPA and PCI, and extending their existing networks into their cloud offering.”

VNS3 images are ready for use in Abiquo’s image repository allowing them to be quickly provisioned into Abiquo virtual data centres running multiple hypervisors. It is now available for Abiquo customers to try on a limited licence or `bring your own licence’ basis.