Metaswitch Networks Announces Project Calico

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM--(Marketwired - Jul 8, 2014) - Metaswitch Networks today is contributing the initial code base for Project Calico, an open-source solution that enables the implementation of large, standards-based, cloud data center infrastructures. The code is available to the worldwide community of network operators, software developers and systems integrators at http://projectcalico.org.

Project Calico represents a new approach to virtual networking, based on the same scalable IP networking principles that are widely deployed within the Internet backbone.

First established in enterprise data centers, network virtualization techniques are becoming increasingly important for emerging network operator infrastructures, providing the foundation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV). While today's smaller cloud data centers leverage Layer 2 techniques, such as Ethernet VLAN, they can quickly hit inherent scaling limits of that technology. Alternatives such as VXLAN, GRE and SDN-controlled flows, however, are inherently complex in the networking domain and add unnecessary processing overheads on host machines. 

The technology behind Project 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 cloud operating systems, such as OpenStack, Project Calico provides the framework for orchestrated IP routing in between virtual machines (VMs) and host machines, along with intra and inter-data center interconnects.

"The largest Internet-based companies in the world are building hyper-scale data centers that are virtualizing at Layer 3, and that approach makes a lot of sense," says Martin Taylor, Metaswitch's chief technical officer. "With Project Calico, we've made it possible to build cloud connectivity so that it looks a lot like Internet connectivity. Project Calico integrates seamlessly with the cloud orchestration system, such as OpenStack, to enable secure IP communication between virtual machines and, in doing so, it provides an approach to virtual networking that is scalable, efficient and simple."