Metaswitch’s Calico Selected by Piston Cloud for Virtual Networking

Piston Cloud integrates Calico into CloudOS 4.0 to enable virtual networking in modern data centers

Metaswitch Networks today announced that Piston Cloud Computing has selected and integrated Project Calico, an open source virtual networking solution that enables the implementation of scalable, standards-based, cloud infrastructures into its latest CloudOS release.

By integrating Calico as the foundation for its networking, Piston Cloud’s CloudOS 4.0 is able to elegantly support heterogeneous workloads such as OpenStack-based virtual machines, bare metal workloads including Hadoop and Spark, and containers running under Kubernetes, Mesos and Docker Swarm.

Calico leverages the fact that the vast majority of today’s workloads are based on IP and that Internet core routing and route discovery techniques, namely the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), are the perfect tools for architecting high-performance, large-scale networks. By tightly integrating with Piston Cloud’s CloudOS, Calico provides the framework for orchestrated IP routing in between virtual machines (VMs) and host machines, along with intra- and inter-data center interconnects.

“Based on our real-world experience of deploying just about every software-defined networking solution out there, we know that networking can become a challenging aspect of building and operating a data center today,” says Steve Bagby, COO of Piston Cloud Computing. “This is why we were so impressed and excited by Project Calico’s ability to remove a lot of complexities. Calico’s support for mixed workloads of virtual machines, containers and bare metal is an essential element of our ability to deliver on the promise of CloudOS 4.0.”

“With CloudOS 4.0, we see Piston Cloud moving into a strongly differentiated position in the cloud infrastructure space,” says Andy Randall, general manager of Metaswitch’s networking business unit. “We are excited that Project Calico is an integral part of this story and happy to be working with Piston Cloud to enable the delivery of top quality support services to their most demanding enterprise customers.”