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Cisco Offers More SDN Hints, Confirms Insieme: Page 3 of 3

"When we talk to our customers, they realize that OpenFlow is largely still research-focused and not production-ready," he says, adding that the relevance of OpenFlow to customers varies by market segment. Cloud service providers are looking at OpenStack more than OpenFlow, with the former being an open-source platform to deliver cloud computing that includes SDN features. Enterprises are cautious about OpenFlow/SDN because of the disruption it may bring. "For them, investment protection is really strong, and anything in the SDN realm is something they’re looking at three to five years out, or even further," says Kiran. "If anything, the majority of the requests [about OpenFlow] we’re seeing are from academia," he adds, noting that many universities are funded for research into SDN technologies.

But the presentations at this week’s ONS demonstrate that OpenFlow-based SDN is more than just an academic exercise. Google, NEC, NTT Docomo and others presented case studies on OpenFlow-based SDN adoption, both internally and with some of their customers. NEC, for instance, presented the example of Nippon Express, a logistics company, that realized many benefits from SDN adoption. For example, it reduced the amount of switch rack space needed by 70%; reduced power consumption by 80%; and reduced failure recovery time by 98%.

In the end, OpenFlow and other approaches to SDN should be able to coexist while the SDN technology evolves, says Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategies Group: "Certainly OpenFlow is helping to raise awareness of [SDN], but it’s not the only way it could be accomplished." Laliberte cites Nicira’s Open vSwitch, Arista Networks' products and Juniper’s QFabric offering as solutions that deliver SDN capability without OpenFlow. In addition, Cisco’s Nexus 1000V line, introduced about three years ago, is not OpenFlow-based.

The Cisco-versus-everybody-else divide boils down to market position, says Laliberte: "Companies like HP and IBM, NEC and all those companies other than Cisco that are looking to take market share [from Cisco] are more aggressively adopting the OpenFlow standard."

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