Jail-Break Your Enterprise Network with Pica8’s Simplified Automation Framework and Switch Stack Replacement Architecture

Pica8’s industry-leading PICOS® NOS for white box networks has been turbo-charged for wide-scale enterprise deployments across remote offices, branch offices, and campuses alike. All the open networking magic that has been taking web-scale data centers by storm is now available for the rest of the enterprise. With its AmpCon™ automation framework and PICOS’ switch stack replacement architecture, Pica8 makes it all simple to deploy and manage.

Built on the open-source Ansible network automation framework, AmpCon enables enterprises to automate tasks including switch software configuration and licensing, turning up VLANs and MLAG, and performing health checks on all Power-over-Ethernet devices. Drawing from a large library of pre-defined Ansible “playbooks”, it can all be done using simple English language commands – no programming skills required.

PICOS further simplifies network operations by combining dozens of open switches into a single, IP address. Upgrade software or security settings for 50 or so PICOS campus switches with a single command. Reduce the number of individual network elements to manage by a factor of 10 to 50 times or more, and slash operational overhead costs.

Even better, PICOS leverages Pica8’s unique CrossFlow™ technology that comes standard with PICOS. CrossFlow allows enterprises to run both L2/L3 stacks and OpenFlow-based software-defined networks on every switch port in a network at the same time. (Think of it as a dedicated SDN security plane.) CrossFlow enables granular control of enterprise applications; deep and dynamic traffic monitoring; and even attack mitigation to take place directly on the switches without interrupting live traffic. No other networking vendor has this capability.

And with PICOS, of course, you get a full enterprise feature set.