Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. is teaming up with Big Switch Networks Inc. in an effort to fight back against so-called “white box” network switch manufacturers.

The company said yesterday it’s making Big Switch Network’s network virtualization products available on its family of Altoline open networking Ethernet switches. The partnership will see HPE resell Big Switch Network’s Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric together with its Altoline switches.

HPE’s Altoline switches can already run networking software from other companies, such as Pica8 Inc. The Altoline series are “open switches” that HPE has designed in an effort to hit back at the rise of cheap, unbranded white boxes designed by original design manufacturers. They’ve grown in popularity with the emergence of software-defined networking and network function virtualization technologies, which essentially carry out networking in software rather than in dedicated hardware.

Larger enterprises and so-called hyperscale data center operators such as Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. are increasingly choosing white box switches over branded systems from companies such as HPE and Dell Technologies Inc. That’s because the white boxes are significantly cheaper yet capable of running software from most networking providers. Indeed, Big Switch Networks’ software also runs on white box switches.

HPE, along with Dell and Juniper Networks Inc., are hitting back with what Gartner Inc. has termed “brite boxes,” which are branded and open switches that can run third-party software. These systems are more expensive than white box switches, but cheaper than traditional branded switches. However, they come with the advantage of support and services from HPE and others in an effort to make them more appealing to customers.

Gartner reckons this approach could well pay off, as it predicts these systems will take a 22 percent slice of the overall Ethernet switch market by 2020.

Big Switch Network’s Big Monitoring Fabric and Big Cloud Fabric are networking products designed to automate network management, providing more visibility and boosting security, the company said. Big Monitoring Fabric is an SDN-based network packet broker that enables scale-out monitoring at half the price of traditional systems. Meanwhile, Big Cloud Fabric is a product that’s designed to automate networks and deliver enhanced visibility into software-defined data centers, as well as support for cloud-native applications and software containers.

The products enable “access to easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy solutions for network management, visibility and security,” said Philippe Michelet, HPE’s senior director of product line management for its Data Center Networking business.

Big Switch Networks has also partnered with Dell EMC to enable its software to run on that company’s family of open network switches.

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