Greg Ferro does a nice job here directly stating the networking incumbents should step up with an SDN strategy.  I agree 100%.  Brad Casemore also chimes in with his thoughts.  If you aren’t already reading their blogs, I encourage you to do so because you’re missing out.

Several companies have announced they have OpenFlow-enabled switches, but for these companies, there is still no strategy and no reasoning as to why their switch should be used when deploying an OpenFlow based SDN.  Furthermore, they lack a strategy overall looking at the various components of a Software Defined Network.  From a hardware standpoint, some of the same features and characteristics  (buffers, table sizes, etc.) will still need to be compared as we already do today in traditional networks, but even that, isn’t documented in these announcements.  A lot of these vendors think they are on the offensive [vs. Cisco] announcing OpenFlow enabled switches (without a controller), but they really aren’t, in my opinion.

I mentioned in my previous post Nick McKeown, uber smart Entrepreneur and Professor at Stanford, gave what I thought was the finest presentation of the week at the Open Networking Summit hosted in Santa Clara this week.  As I wait to board my plane back to the East coast, here is a more detailed recap of the presentation and what I took away from it…

Here is a quick summary on what I think worked well, what didn't work, and some thoughts on improving ONS next year.

What worked?

• Getting everyone together that has an interest in OpenFlow/SDN.  It was great to collaborate and talk with like minded individuals even though we, as an industry, are probably still on the incline of the hype cycle.
• Google, Yahoo, etc.  Anything these hyper scale companies talk about is damn interesting
• Exhibits – these are great for any conference and will only improve at ONS as more products are further developed and created.
• VC presentation by Lightspeed.  Great presentation here and I’m sure it got the wheels spinning for anyone with an entrepreneurial mind since they are still looking to invest and also believe it’s early in the life of SDN.
• Nick McKewon – see my next blog post.  This was the best presentation of the week.  Wish I could have seen Nick present all day.
• Pragmatic view by mostly all admitting there is still a way to go in this shift to SDN.
• Logistics, overall schedule, multiple projector screens, and the like. 
• There were many more presentation that were also intriguing, but those listed above were the ones top of mind right now.
• Overall, extremely glad I had the opportunity to attend ONS 2012.

With just a few minutes to spare until the 5:30 start of the evening event and exhibits, I thought I’d give a really quick summary of Day 1 at the Open Networking Summit 2012.  Note there were two tutorial sessions today and I attended the one for engineers.

The first thing you noticed by seeing everyone’s badges/name tags with associated company, and was confirmed by Brandon’s presentation in the first slide, was there was and is a truly broad audience here.  There are the obvious participants from the big name manufacturers, but also, there are between 1-3 people from at least 60 “other” companies, which is the category I fall into since I’m the only one representing BlueWater from NY/NJ.  I also had the pleasure of sitting next to the sole person from Aruba Networks as well.  Not sure what that tells you about their SDN strategy.