Industry Leaders Collaborate on OpenDaylight Project, Donate Key Technologies to Accelerate Software-Defined Networking

New open source framework to drive innovation and acceleration of technologies, allows customers, partners and community to shape SDN

SAN FRANCISCO, April 8, 2013 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to open source development and technologies, today announced the founding of the OpenDaylight Project, a community-led and industry-supported open source framework that will accelerate adoption, foster new innovation and create a more open and transparent approach to Software-Defined Networking (SDN).

Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, NEC, Red Hat and VMware are founding Platinum and Gold members of the project and will donate software and engineering resources for this open source framework and help to define the future of an open SDN platform.

Founded on the principles of open and transparent development, OpenDaylight unites technology industry leaders to establish the largest SDN open source project to date, with the goal of a common and open SDN platform for developers to utilize, contribute to and build commercial products and technologies upon. The OpenDaylight Project is committed to furthering adoption of SDN as well as accelerating innovation on top of the platform in new and differentiated ways in a vendor-neutral and open environment where anyone can participate based on the merit of their contributions.

“This is a rare gathering of leaders in the technology ecosystem who have decided to combine efforts in a common platform in order to innovate faster and build better products for their customers,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The world has learned that collaborative development can quickly drive software innovation, especially in fast moving markets. We are excited to be working with OpenDaylight and expect truly amazing things to come.”

The expansion of data centers and rise of cloud computing in the enterprise coupled with rapidly changing demands on service provider networks is driving companies to look to software-defined solutions to help improve network performance and management, lower costs and increase efficiencies. SDN can enable organizations to achieve these goals through speedy delivery of new cloud, big data, social business and mobile services. OpenDaylight will work to provide an open source platform for products and technologies that expand the intelligence of underlying network infrastructure to make it more responsive to overall IT and service provider demands.

By supporting open standards such as the OpenFlow Networking Standard, OpenDaylight will empower the developer ecosystem to deliver a common open source framework and platform for SDN across the industry for customers, partners and developers. OpenDaylight will help customers with their IT strategies by having a single, multi-vendor and open source SDN platform on top of which further development by companies and individuals alike can be fostered.  

The first code from the OpenDaylight Project is expected to be released in 3Q13 and expected donations and projects include an open controller, a virtual overlay network, protocol plug-ins and switch device enhancements. A variety of companies and organizations are already proposing contributions or considering open sourcing key technologies that will be reviewed by the OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee (TSC) for possible inclusion in the project: 

• Arista Networks is pleased to contribute software and architectural expertise in building large-scale cloud environments to the OpenDaylight Project. The integration of a high-performance distributed network fabric into a self-service, automated, and virtualized environment is a challenging and critical area of investment to truly enable SDN and cloud environments.

• Consistent with its commitment to open source, Big Switch Networks is planning to contribute open source elements of its Open SDN Suite to the OpenDaylight Project, including controller code, advanced data store with high availability, distributed virtual routing service applications, network virtualization, network overlays, and other applications.

• Brocade has submitted proposals and is working with the community to contribute technologies to provide elastic, on-demand services that span the data center and range from storage networking to Ethernet fabric, virtual routing and Layer 4-7 services.

• Cisco has contributed controller technology to the Project including an Application Framework and Service Abstraction Layer (SAL). This provides basic controller functionality with support for southbound plug-ins to communicate with network devices using various protocols including OpenFlow, the ability to integrate controller applications as modules, and a set of REST APIs that expose the controller capabilities.

• Citrix is pleased to contribute an application controller that integrates Layer 4-7 network services for enabling application awareness and comprehensive control into the OpenDaylight Project. This will help simplify network administration by enabling a prescriptive, app-driven approach for defining networking policy and topology and automating network configuration. Citrix has also committed to contributing a plug-in for OpenDaylight into the Apache CloudStack project.

• Ericsson intends to contribute software and networking expertise to ensure that the OpenDaylight Project succeeds in creating a common, open SDN platform. Ericsson’s contributions will focus on flow management and service state controls. 

• HP is committed to participate in the OpenDaylight Project community that promotes and advances its goals of simplifying, scaling and automating campus, branch and data center networks. 

• IBM intends to submit an open source version of its Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) technology as its initial contribution. DOVE is designed to work on top of existing network infrastructures to help simplify the process of setting up, managing and scaling virtual networks for faster and more flexible delivery of cloud, analytics, mobile and social business services.  

• Juniper Networks has proposed to contribute a number of technical elements including XMPP client and server protocol code and a flexible data model to extend and enhance the OpenDaylight Project. Juniper sees OpenDaylight as a valuable means for its customers to get access to a wide range of high-quality SDN functionality.

• NEC intends to propose its Virtual Tenant Networking (VTN) model and application in Q2 of 2013, which enables users to create and manage multi-tenant virtual networks.

• Nuage Networks will contribute technologies and expertise that will allow an OpenFlow system to match the operational expectations of large-scale cloud service provider.

• PLUMgrid will contribute in the area of Virtual Network Infrastructure, including technology and innovative ideas on creating a more flexible framework for network application and services development.

• Red Hat is excited to participate in the OpenDaylight Project community to openly build and deliver an SDN solution integrated with OpenStack, Linux and KVM.

Additional products and code offerings from other companies, academia and individuals are expected to follow, and code donations are welcome on an ongoing basis from the open source developer community. OpenDaylight is operating system independent and is expected to be available on multiple platforms. It is structured and governed using open source best practices and is licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL), which is a common choice for Java-based projects.

As the host for the largest collaborative development effort in history, The Linux Foundation offers a blueprint for projects like OpenDaylight on collaboration, open source best practices and governance. Collaborative development and open source software are recognized as strategic assets for accelerating technology evolution and deployments in highly complex, cutting-edge environments. The rapid iteration and broad visibility of community-driven activities are proven to result in faster technology releases and superior code development, all of which will be key with OpenDaylight.  

About the OpenDaylight Project

OpenDaylight is an open source Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. Founded by industry leaders Arista Networks, Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Ericsson, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, NEC, Nuage Networks, PLUMgrid, Red Hat and VMware and open to all, it is designed to accelerate innovation and speed customer adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). For more information about the OpenDaylight Project and to get involved, please visit: http://www.opendaylight.org.

Company Comments

Arista Networks

“There is a clear opportunity for the networking industry to collaborate on an open source framework to advance Software-Defined Networking. The OpenDaylight Project brings a meeting of the minds of SDN leaders, developers and technologists to build next-generation data centers and clouds. Arista Networks is a founding member of the OpenDaylight Project and we are excited to contribute to the transformation of the networking industry,” stated Tom Black vice president of SDN engineering at Arista Networks.

Big Switch Networks

“Industry collaboration like this indicates that SDN has clearly made the transition from pure innovation to commercial integration within existing IT infrastructures. This shift, which began just five years ago in Stanford University’s Clean Slate Lab, is already in production in some of the world’s largest networks,” said Jason Matlof, VP of Marketing at Big Switch. “Rapid commercial adoption of SDN is being achieved through a robust community and the innovations of technology startups, like Big Switch. The OpenDaylight Project is another step toward wide, commercial adoption of open SDN.”

Brocade

“The OpenDaylight Project is an important step toward wide adoption and pragmatic implementation of SDN through a standard, open platform,” said David Meyer, Service Provider business CTO and chief scientist at Brocade. “Brocade is in full support of this community-driven open source project, which we believe will enable a rapid development cycle and enforce a strict peer-review process that ensures a validated blueprint upon which all customers can build their SDN strategies.”

Cisco

“Network programmability and orchestration are key pillars of Cisco’s strategy, and we are excited to be participating in OpenDaylight with other amazing partners and community members to further the technologies and products associated with it. We see Open Source as critical to our customers and equally important as our standards efforts for SDN, and we look forward to collaborating with partners, customers and developers to help them increase the speed of building and deploying software-defined offerings,” said David Ward, CTO of Engineering, Cisco Systems. 

Citrix

“Open-source development inspires industry collaboration, accelerates innovation, and changes the economics of how technology is consumed by the market. For SDN to fulfill its long-term promise of delivering application aware networking, the programmatic dimension of the network services layer plays a critical role in how Service Providers and companies can architect for the increased demand, scale and security required by cloud and mobile services,” said Klaus Oestermann, Group VP and GM Cloud Networking, Citrix. “As a founding member of the OpenDaylight Project, Citrix looks forward to collaborating closely with the project around the services/application control layer and providing integrations into key building blocks like the OpenController, OpenStack and CloudStack.”

Dell

“We are excited to participate in the OpenDaylight open source project. As a leading networking vendor Dell is supporting an open-source software stack for SDN, and a corresponding open-standards project in OMG. We want our own experiences in SDN to be shared with the industry and we welcome OpenDaylight efforts so that no industry player can restrict or control the innovations in SDN,” said Tom Burns General Manager and VP Dell Networking, Enterprise Solutions Group.

Ericsson

“Our customers see Software-Defined Networking as critical to the ongoing evolution of the network. Ericsson is committed to deliver on the promise of SDN to open the network to innovation and new business models,” said Jan Haglund, VP and Head of Product Area IP and Broadband at Ericsson. “We support the OpenDaylight Project because collaboration on an open source SDN platform will help to accelerate the realization of the SDN promise.”

Fujitsu

“It is through the Open Daylight Project that top IT vendors across an array of fields will take up the new challenge of realizing SDN. As a founding member of this project – which holds the potential of breakthrough technologies that optimize datacenters – Fujitsu’s participation will contribute to its success through enhanced virtual networks on the Cloud Management Platform, and by leveraging the Company’s capabilities in open source development,” said Yoichi Hori, Executive Vice President, Platform Software Business Unit at Fujitsu.

HP

“In the era of cloud and mobility, open source become even more important as it is required to deploy applications or services within minutes,” said Bethany Mayer, senior vice president and general manager, Networking, HP.  “HP’s commitment to this is already proven with the world’s largest install-base of OpenFlow switches, SDN controller and SDN applications and we look forward to extending that lead as part of the OpenDaylight initiative.”

IBM

“IBM is working with customers and others to design, build and support the new era of computing – an era driven by unprecedented data growth, and the wide scale adoption of such game-changing technologies as cloud, mobile, social and Big Data analytics,” said Dr. Ambuj Goyal, General Manager, System Storage & Networking at IBM. “A key aspect of this new paradigm is the software defined environment that brings much needed intelligence to the network. We believe that the OpenDaylight Project will help clients ascend to this level of enterprise computing and start reaping the performance, management and cost benefits associated with the software-defined environment. In addition, IBM is delighted to have played a key role in the formation of this collaborative initiative, which aligns well with our long-term commitment to openness and innovation.”

Intel

“SDN provides an opportunity for cloud, enterprise IT and telco providers to realize new efficiencies and pursue new services. We are at a critical inflection where the industry requires open source controllers and standard APIs developed at a consortium level topropel SDN into the mainstream. These actions will foster the growth of a whole new generation of networking solutions. Intel is excited to be a part of the leadership that is defining these standards-based approaches under the OpenDaylight Project,” said Rose Schooler, GM Communications, and Storage Infrastructure Group at Intel Corporation.

Juniper Networks

“Industry collaboration, open standards and heterogeneous support across vendors are paramount to realizing the full potential of SDN,” said Brad Brooks, vice president of business strategy and marketing, Software Solutions Division at Juniper Networks. “Juniper Networks supports the OpenDaylight Project because we believe cooperation in the industry and the development of a common SDN platform will ultimately benefit customers by accelerating the design and delivery of new services and lowering the cost of network operation.”

Microsoft

“Microsoft is pleased to be a member of the OpenDaylight Project and to work with industry leaders to create a common framework and platform for SDN. The OpenDaylight Project aligns with Microsoft’s commitment to open standards-based development and enables the industry to benefit from Microsoft’s deep experience running global, large-scale datacenters and delivering flexible, elastic cloud-scale services,” said Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Windows Server and System Center.

NEC

“As a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies and an active contributor to SDN/OpenFlow technology, NEC is dedicated to fostering the rapid innovation of SDN,” said Takemi Hosaka, associate senior vice president, NEC Corporation. “As the first company to offer an OpenFlow controller to the market, NEC is proud to be a founding member of the OpenDaylight Project, which will help accelerate the deployment of SDN in the marketplace.”

Nuage Networks

“Nuage Networks is eager to work with industry leaders who share its vision of bringing programmability and automation to the networks that power the cloud. We strongly believe that an open environment that encourages developer innovation and breaks artificial boundaries that constrain the responsiveness and diameter of network services is essential to realizing the full potential of cloud services,” said Sunil Khandekar, Founder and CEO, Nuage Networks.

PLUMgrid

“With the growing adoption of Virtual Network Infrastructure in Cloud IT, there remains a missing component of integration with the capabilities of Physical Networks. The OpenDaylight Project brings together the players and technology needed to articulate this integration within a rich ecosystem,” said Pere Monclus, CTO at PLUMgrid. “Initiatives like OpenDaylight will enable our customers to fully realize the benefits of SDN technologies and drive the adoption of Automated Networking in the broader Cloud IT marketplace.”

Red Hat

“Red Hat has long championed the open source development model, which can result in faster innovation and accelerated technology adoption. The OpenDaylight Project is designed in line with these principles in order to bring a more open approach to Software-Defined Networking to bring better technology to the industry faster. Red Hat is pleased to participate in the OpenDaylight community alongside The Linux Foundation and many other industry leaders to drive the evolution of Software-Defined networking,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and Vice President, Engineering at Red Hat.

VMware

“Customers need an open, interoperable future for Software-Defined Networking. VMware contributes to this future through participation in key open source projects such as Open vSwitch and OpenStack Quantum,” said Hatem Naguib, vice president, Cloud Networking and Security, VMware. “Our participation in the OpenDaylight Project reinforces our commitment to help customers continue to benefit from compatibility and interoperability across Software-Defined Networking technologies as they adopt them in their environments.”

Additional Resources

• Video: Introducing The OpenDaylight Project
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About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and collaborative software development. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

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 Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo, Tizen, and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. OpenDaylight Project is a trademark of the OpenDaylight Project, Inc. Other trademarks and copyrights are owned by their respective owners.