ONF’s Dan Pitt recaps Interop Las Vegas and the member company announcements made throughout the event.
I have attended way too many Interop events throughout my career, and after speaking at this year’s Las Vegas event, I must say that this conference certainly stood out. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) was a hot topic at the conference, and rightfully so. Two years ago Network World said “Interop 2011 could have been called the OpenFlow® show,” and now not only the OpenFlow® standard, but many more aspects of SDN were center stage, and the glorious promises were actually punctuated by real product announcements. This disruptive technology is changing the way that industries approach networking, creating dynamic, streamlined networks offering incredible benefits for end users.
Further emphasizing the mounting momentum of the SDN movement, many of our own Open Networking Foundation (ONF) member companies made announcements throughout the event. Member companies announced new OpenFlow-enabled switches, SDN controllers, and SDN platform capabilities including support of the OpenFlow® protocol. Founding ONF member Facebook announced that the Open Compute Project, a community of engineers working to specify open-source hardware designs for an efficient computing infrastructure, is working on an open-source top-of-rack network switch, a project ONF partly originated and sponsors. And new ONF member Arista Networks was named Best of Interop 2013 winner.
Announcements made by ONF member companies at Interop Las Vegas included:
Arista Networks was named the Best of Interop 2013 winner. The company announced that their 7500E Modular Data Center Ethernet Switch won both the Grand Prize as well as the Networking category. Arista’s 7500E offers a solid hardware foundation for effective cloud services, SDN, and mobile networks, and one pillar of their software-defined cloud networking strategy is single point of management with no proprietary lock-in and OpenFlow.
Big Switch Networks and F5 have teamed up to offer a joint network automation solution leveraging Big Switch’s Big Virtual Switch Application, running on a platform for OpenFlow-enabled SDN, and F5’s BIG IQ Cloud Rest API to simplify orchestration of private cloud data center networks with speed provisioning.
During Frank Frankovsky’s keynote, Facebook announced that the Open Compute Project will be creating and releasing an open source top-of-rack switch, likely to support the OpenFlow® protocol. Facebook is working with a variety of industry collaborators, including ONF and many of our member companies.
Huawei announced new switches and networking capabilities, including expanding the company’s platforms to offer programmability for a variety of interfaces, such as the OpenFlow® protocol.
Juniper Networks introduced JunosV Contrail, a collection of products including the JunosV Contrail Controller for SDN. It is currently being tested by global service provider and enterprise customers, and is expected to begin shipping in the second half of 2013.
NEC announced its SDN Application Center built on an open northbound API with apps from a variety of vendor partners. The SDN Application Center works in conjunction with NEC’s OpenFlow-based SDN solutions to offer additional network management and optimization.
Our member companies are continuing to advance the SDN movement through new products and services, and I am looking forward to witnessing what is to come. Not being (that kind of) a gambler, I don’t go to Las Vegas for fun. My time there is all about I/O and I always leave exhilarated (and exhausted).
- Dan Pitt, Executive Director
