OpenFlow expert Greg Ferro, author of a recent InformationWeek report comparing OpenFlow to traditional networks, says the protocol is the first step down a long road. The OpenFlow 1.0 protocol, like version 1.0 of just about anything, has its flaws, he said, and members of the OpenFlow community are working to improve on it. But there are live production networks running on OpenFlow, and there are OpenFlow-based products on the market.
The three pillars of openness that Big Switch supports are critical to the development of this nascent technology, says Gartner's Joe Skorupa, a VP and distinguished analyst in the area of data center convergence research.
“The real value [in Open Flow] is in the applications that are developed that deliver that agility, that flexibility,” he says. “[Big Switch wants] that industry to develop, they want to sell high-value applications, they also want to be able to work with partners that also build high-value applications.”
Skorupa also concurs with Big Switch that it needs to advocate open standards in order to gain a foothold in data centers already filled with equipment from established vendors such as HP, Juniper, Brocade and, especially, Cisco Systems, the overall networking market leader. Big Switch doesn’t expect customers to rip and replace their entire networking infrastructures with its SDN products and so it has to interoperate with the incumbent.
While he said the emergence of SDN based on Open Flow is “very, very early,” there have been some notable strong showings of support for it. He lauded HP for last month's decision to offer customers a free download of Open Flow to their HP equipment across 16 different product lines to enable SDN on those switches and routers. He also pointed to another startup, Nicira, which emerged from stealth mode, also in February, with several high-profile customers already using its version of SDN, notably AT&T, eBay, Rackspace and the financial services firm Fidelity.
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