Another piece has fallen into place in Brocade Communications Systems Inc.’s software-defined networking plans with today’s introduction of a virtual controller that bundles the latest release of the OpenDaylight Project as a fully supported product ready for enterprise use.

The vendor is hailing the new Vyatta Controller as a “keystone” of its emerging programmable networking line, which aims to counter Cisco Systems Inc.’s Application-Centric Infrastructure portfolio and similar offerings from smaller competitors. The software also marks the arguably most significant product release to have come out of the Vyatta unit since it was absorbed into Brocade two years ago.

The announcement follows hot on the heels of the company acquiring yet another network virtualization startup, an Indian monitoring specialist called Vistapointe Inc. that develops software for collecting useful information about mobile traffic. Insights gleaned through the platform can help carriers reduce latency and define automated management polices, which are two of the main use cases that Brocade is touting for Vyatta Controller.

The new offering is based on code from the latest “Helium” release of the OpenDaylight Project, a coalition of vendors Brocade helped found last April that’s working toward delivering a common interoperability layer to unify all the different SDN technologies in the marketplace. That the Vyatta Controller uses OpenDaylight as its core architecture has several major advantages, according to the vendor.

First, Brocade says that customers will have access to new features and improvements rolled out with future versions of the upstream project, which has the potential to add up to quite a bit of free functionality over the lifespan of the controller. Secondly, the open-source nature of the offering means that organizations will have the freedom to augment it with features and optimizations tailored to meet their unique internal requirements.

In addition, any custom additions that a user makes can theoretically be ported to any competing controller software that implements OpenDaylight without requiring a rewrite, freeing up time and resources better spent elsewhere. The list of compatible offerings is admittedly short at present, which limits CIOs’ options, but Brocade is banking on the current roster to expand as the project continues to gain traction.

To round out the open-core value proposition, the company has extended that interoperability down to the hardware layer, making it possible to deploy Vyatta Controller as a virtual machine across a broad array of physical networking devices. The supported lineup consists of its own products, including the vRouter family it obtained through the acquisition of Vyatta, as well “popular third-party network equipment” from competing vendors, according to Brocade. The software also works with major hypervisors, firewalls, VPNs and load balancers.

The end result is that admins can manage their entire infrastructure – or at least most of it – from a single place, which removes a lot of the hassle historically involved in configuring and provisioning enterprise networks. To further simplify the task, Brocade plans to release a number of value-added apps to complement the controller, starting with a tool for mapping out network topography and optimizing packet patching that will become available as soon as the platform launches in November. It’s set to be joined by a traffic management application aimed at helping customers address usage spikes and distributed-denial-of-service attacks that is scheduled to roll out in 2015.