By Chad Berndtson, CRN, February 6, 2012, 1430 hrs
Looking to broaden its market influence over the emerging OpenFlow networking protocol, HP has planned to make OpenFlow-enabled versions of 16 of its switch models available for commercial sale. HP plans to provide similar OpenFlow support across all switches under its FlexNetwork architecture by the end of the year.
As a switching and communications protocol, OpenFlow has garnered considerable interest in recent years for the way it addresses packet routing on a software layer that is separate from a network's physical infrastructure. OpenFlow's proponents point to its flexibility, in that OpenFlow-supported controller and send instructions to any OpenFlow-enabled switch, regardless of manufacturer. That flexibility makes OpenFlow, in theory, a glove-fit for virtualized networks because it makes them that much easier to customize and program around.
HP has supported OpenFlow on its switches for four years, but buying OpenFlow switches from HP required a special license, said Saar Gillai, Vice President, Advanced Technology Group and CTO, HP Networking. The difference now is that HP is making those switches broadly commercially available, and its existing switch customers can enable OpenFlow via a software update.
"We have seen very strong demand for it, so we are pushing it out," Gillai said. "This is a tier-1 vendor putting out commercial-grade OpenFlow support across a fairly wide product set. We believe this is going to speed up the adoption and use of OpenFlow among customers."
The initial 16 models covered in HP's update include 3500, 4500 and 8200 switch lines, HP said.
Among top-tier networking and switch vendors like Cisco and Juniper, HP's support for OpenFlow has been the most vocal. The company is also a founding member of the Open Networking Foundation.
As OpenFlow and the broader software-defined networking (SDN) movement gain traction, Industry observers are trying to get a sense of how big vendors like Cisco and Juniper will address OpenFlow. Juniper, for example, has added OpenFlow to its SDK for Junos, its data center and networking operating system. Cisco has said it will add OpenFlow to its Nexus data center switches.
But a common argument is that OpenFlow and SDN could prove potentially damaging to long-dominant switch players like Cisco for how the technology could further commoditize the switch market. Gillai says he is not so sure that's the case.
"There is a school of thought that talks about commoditization," Gillai acknowledged. "But it's also about flexibility. Look at wireless, where access points used to have all the control. We moved to the controller model, and that gave customers more flexibility in deployment. OpenFlow is going to enable some really interesting capabilities in what you can do."
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