Kaloom debuts Cloud Edge Fabric for distributed edge data centers

Following up on the release of its Software Defined Fabric (SDF) product family last year, Kaloom announced its Cloud Edge Fabric (CEF), which it describes as the first fully automated data center network fabric with native support for network slicing, along with embedded 5G user plane function.

According to Kaloom, its CEF solution was designed in collaboration with its customers and partners to address the key requirements for the cloud edge market, such as lowering latency and improving performance at a lower price.

“We believe that automation, unified VNF/CNF, programmability and network slicing will disrupt the way service providers deploy and manage cloud edge data centers,” said Laurent Marchand, CEO at Kaloom, in a press release.

Kaloom is in trials now with a few unnamed Tier 1 telco carriers with this solution, with the hope of having a commercial production-ready product in 2019, according to Thomas Eklund, Kaloom's VP of marketing and strategy. He declined to say whether any of them are located in the U.S.

“We have done a very good 5G slicing solution,” he said. “A key feature in our software defined fabric is that you can virtualize the data center.”  

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Kaloom said its CEF complements last year’s release of the Kaloom SDF that is more suited for large-scale data centers. However, the same core attributes remain including programmability, automation, white box networking, data plane offloading and virtual components (i.e., vRouters, vSwitchs and vGWs) integration.

The SDF is optimized on the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to enable control and better support for Kubernetes environments. The CEF also supports sophisticated services chaining and in-band telemetry to improve overall networking efficiency, according to Kaloom. Kaloom CEF and SDF on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenStack Platform can run network functions in virtual machines (VNFs) as well as hosting them in containers.  

“Kaloom’s innovative SDF is now complemented with the CEF to provide a suite of fully automated DC fabric products for core and edge deployments,” said Paul Parker-Johnson, principal analyst with ACG Research, in the release. “A low latency, automated deployment with the ability to host both VNF and CNF environments in a unified way will greatly benefit edge applications like AI, ML, IoT and 5G.”

The host of networking solutions can be seen at Kaloom’s stand at Mobile World Congress 2019 in Barcelona later this month, where the startup will be conducting a demo.