8 Open Networking Terms To Know

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When you talk to people about the concept of "open networking," you're likely to get blank stares. Are you referring to network virtualization, software-defined networking (SDN), OpenFlow, or something completely different? Open networking is a very generic term that covers a great deal of territory.

For the most part, open networking has to do with SDN and virtualization technologies that are open source in nature. There are a few different organizations that revolve around open networking and help to build a forum where anyone interested in SDN can take part in the creation of open source protocols that facilitate the SDN architecture.

One organization -- the Open Networking Foundation -- took the approach of developing a new SDN protocol from the ground up. Compatible network switches could run this open source software on bare-metal hardware as opposed to proprietary software, which is often the case in traditional network environments today.

Another open networking group -- the European Telcommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) -- aimed to create open networking software that ran on top of proprietary hardware/software. That way, the entire network could be configured with an overlay network and hardware did not have to be replaced.

On the following pages, we'll discuss these organizations and point out common open networking terms that are frequently used in these types of discussions. Our goal is to get you familiar with the terminology to the point where you can carry on a conversation about open networking in general without getting confused by the topic.

And once you've read through the slides, let us know whether this helped to clarify the scope of open networking. Hopefully, together, we'll be able to sort out what does and does not fall under the category of open networking.

(Image: Geralt/Pixabay)