Big Switch Networks Hopes to Change Networking Landscape with SDN Offerings

Big Switch Networks (News - Alert) has unveiled the three pillars of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture, two years after its launch. The Palto Alto based company, founded in 2010, offers enterprise networks virtualization and cloud architecture solutions and hopes to inspire future innovation with their new offering.

"SDN has the promise to change the networking landscape, helping drive innovation and increasing business agility and operational efficiency of the network,” said Joe Skorupa, VP Analyst at Gartner (News - Alert). “However, to reach its full potential, it must integrate with the existing ecosystem and standards."

Guido Appenzeller, co-founder and CEO of Big Switch Networks, said it was critical for customers to adopt open source technologies like OpenFlow and SDN. Open standards and APIs are also gaining significant momentum in light of the demand.

Added Guido: “Big Switch Networks has been at the forefront of the OpenFlow standard creation, offered enterprise-grade open source SDN solutions to the community and continuously expanded its ecosystem of partners. Openness will be core to SDN success, and by relentlessly delivering it in our Open SDN(TM) architecture we plan to stay ahead of the market."

The 3 pillars that Open SDN architecture is based on are Open Standards, Open APIs and Open Source (News - Alert). Open Standards like OpenFlow make it possible for SDN ecosystem players to deploy SDN solutions to existing networks seamlessly, today and in the future. Open APIs allow the creation of applications, infrastructure and network services solutions, more aligned to business priorities. Open Source in networking helps avoid lock-ins by providing transparency in code quality as well as active community contributions.

"For the last decade, most major changes in the software industry have been associated with open source: Hadoop with Big Data, Linux with Operating Systems and Netscape for the Web,” said the Indiana University (News - Alert) Chief Network Architect and Executive Director at InCNTRE. “As networking moves toward more programmability thanks to SDN, we should also expect strong open source communities to develop around solutions like the one Big Switch Networks introduced with Floodlight."

Big Switch Networks supports open APIs and standards like OpenFlow, and earlier this year offered its commercial Controller solution, Floodlight, as open source.