Dell is pushing its software-defined networking vision forward with new additions focussing on the flow of East-to-West traffic flow, task automation and switches designed to scale and integrate with other vendor products.

It said the new releases, based around its Active Fabric solutions for software-defined networking (SDN), are designed to help customers accelerate transitions to high-performance converged, virtualized and private cloud environments.

Dell has made use of its next-generation management software – Dell Active Fabric Manager – and the Dell Networking S5000 modular LAN/SAN switching platform for these latest networking announcements.

Dell Networking VP and general manager Tom Burns aid the new offerings will simplify operations and boost performance and improve the economics of the network.

“We’re challenging conventional wisdom with new products and solutions designed to accelerate our customers’ migration to virtualized and cloud data center environments,” Burns said.

Dell said its Active Fabric provides a flat, fast, any-to-any multipath network architecture that is flexible and ideally suited for the growing amount of East-West traffic in today’s virtualized data centers and private clouds.

Active Fabric solutions flatten the traditional data center network architecture using high-density and low-latency, fixed-form factor 10/40GbE switches that can be deployed quickly and easily while reaching to hyperscale proportions.

It supports Open-Flow based controllers from leading vendors and uses hypervisors from Microsoft, VMware and OpenStack.

Dell said it has been purpose built for virtualized, converged and SDN environments with high performance 10GbE and 40GbE L2 and L3 multipath fabrics.

Dell also released released its Active Fabric manager, a software tool designed to help automate the roles, from planning to designing, building and monitoring fabrics in the network.

It includes an intuitive graphical interface and step-by-step approach to translating fabric design, and allows for easier integration with other tools in the data center with a the fabric extracted as a single entity, instead of at a device level.

Dell also released its first 1U 10/40BgE top-of-rack LAN/SAN – the Dell Networking S5000 - with native FC and FCoE capabilities that offers pay-as-you grow modularity, high density LAN/SAN convergence and is easily integrated with leading switch and storage vendors.