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Innovation: OpenFlow/SDN
Go with the (Open) Flow
At the end of 2006, Stanford University’s Professor Nick McKeown proposed an initiative to implement SDN, resulting in the development of the OpenFlow protocol above, which has since been ratified as an inter-manufacturer standard, with the Open Networking Foundation having 89 members as of February 2013.
Dr. Atsushi Iwata, Deputy General Manager, Cloud Systems Research Laboratories, worked together with McKeown at Stanford on this project, allowing NEC to be the winning vendor in the race to bring a range of OpenFlow products to the market. OpenFlow is “open” in two senses: firstly, it is an open, inter-manufacturer standard, allowing common control of networking equipment, regardless of the maker. Secondly, it “opens the box” in the sense envisaged by Watanabe–it is possible for the user of OpenFlow equipment to get “under the hood” and control the flow of data through the network.
Atsushi Iwata, Ph.D.Deputy General Manager
Cloud Systems Research Laboratories
NEC saw this new approach to networks as an opportunity to create new markets. Iwata admits that NEC’s decision to go with this new technology was “a bet, but it has paid off.”
Out of this initiative came the OpenFlow standard as described above, to which NEC has added value with its ProgrammableFlow® architecture providing users with an integrated comprehensive networking platform. Being the first to commercialize OpenFlow products, NEC has been able to bring to market a range of equipment (switches, both hardware and software, and a dedicated controller) that provides users with the ability to perform “on-the-fly” reconfiguration of the networks through modification of the network devices’ behavior. In addition to hardware, the ProgrammableFlow® solution includes an easy-to-use graphical interface, allowing simplified intuitive planning and implementation of changes to a network, even when the network is spread across different sites.
The advantages of SDN and the lead that NEC enjoys in this field, have been recognized by industry experts. “SDN promises to remake networking, delivering unprecedented network virtualization and rich application-driven programmability and agility,” says Rohit Mehra, VP Network Infrastructure at IDC Corporation. “NEC has demonstrated great leadership in OpenFlowbased SDN with its ProgrammableFlow® networking technology, which provides fullfunction benefits to IT organizations looking for the next generation of networking.”
Webinar
Getting Started With Software-Defined Networking
