Big Switch Networks, an SDN player that jumped in deep with the vendor-led consortium as a top-of-the-line platinum member, implying financial and developer contributions to the project, is giving up its board seat and downgrading to a silver member, Network World reported Wednesday.

Jason Matlof, the company’s vice president of marketing, was quoted as saying that OpenDaylight is “not in the best interest of the industry or as a technical place to start.”

The news followed an OpenDaylight announcement that five more companies had gotten aboard, including Cyan, Huawei and Radware.

Big Switch CEO Guido Appenzeller explained the company’s reasoning in a Wednesday blog post, noting that, while the OpenDaylight Project had initially looked at merging code from Cisco and Big Switch’s open-source Floodlight controller to form “a clean, new repository,” the leaders of the consortium ultimately chose “to start the project with the Cisco controller as the base repository.” (David Meyer, chairman of OpenDaylight’s Technical Steering Committee and a Brocade executive, describes the proposal differently, saying it incorporates “robust features” from Big Switch in addition to Cisco code.)

The Big Switch code is more time-tested than the Cisco code, Appenzeller argued, and anyway it will be hard for Big Switch to run some of its applications atop the controller code going forward. A source told us that Big Switch had joined OpenDaylight with the hope of staving off the adoption of Cisco’s controller code, and now it appears Big Switch was outgunned.

In addition to complicating Big Switch’s efforts to push proprietary applications, Appenzeller wrote that OpenDaylight might not be doing enough to give customers with what they want:

The second, and more important reason is that our energy is better spent concentrating on the needs of the user community – not playing politics with the incumbent vendor community. Specifically, the market is clamoring for a transition toward “bare metal switches,” or “white box switches,” which provide customers an ability to rack-n-stack switches and centrally provision them just like they do with data center rack servers today.

It’s hard to say how much the OpenDaylight controller code will end up keeping Cisco customers buying from Cisco instead of more open switches, but it’s a legitimate concern as companies wonder if they might be able to implement SDN and do more with simpler — and less expensive — switches. (We’ll be talking about what use cases are possible with SDN at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco in two weeks.)

It would be nice to see some customer representation on OpenDaylight Project, Appenzeller noted. That could bring some assurance that the resulting standards will help not just vendors but many kinds of companies interested in reaping the benefits of separating the control plane from the data plane.

In the meantime, still more drama could unfold in the OpenDaylight Project, as official code is expected to ship in the third quarter of the year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise

Big Switch’s new Switch Light software implements the OpenFlow networking protocol in physical and virtual switches. It lets data center administrators automatically and centrally send out policies from one location when new switches are added to the network, instead of having to go through with a time-consuming, hands-on process.

The open-source version of Switch Light is available for free because “we want to make sure (OpenFlow) industry standards are enabled in the data plane,” said Jason Matlof, vice president of marketing at Big Switch. The commercial version comes with technical support and is more scalable and highly available than the open-source version, Matlof said.

Switch Light is based on existing open-source technology developed a few years ago under the name Indigo. Customers can sign up to use the Switch Light software under a licensing agreement along with Big Switch’s other software-defined networking products — the Big Switch Controller for the network’s control plane, the Big Virtual Switch and the Big Tap monitoring program.

Consider the news another blow to Cisco, as the Big Switch software is aimed at customers that want to move away from lock-in from the legacy network hardware vendor and shift elements of their network stacks to white-label suppliers. Cisco still holds 65 percent of marketshare for Ethernet switches. Arista and Juniper play here, too.

As I reported earlier this month, Quanta Computer is keen on selling network gear such as switches directly to companies through a newly formed subsidiary, Quanta QCT, just as it has shifted from a primarily original-design manufacturer to a direct seller of servers. Quanta and other commodity switch makers, such as Supermicro, could benefit from the Switch Light release as well.

All eyes are on Cisco and Arista to make the next move. Meanwhile, as the Switch Light affords Big Switch a more rounded out product line, the company could again look like a good buy, just as it did last summer.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Cloud and data third-quarter 2012

Earlier this week I wrote about how NTT Communications has been rolling out SDN at multiple data centers around the world, to automate network configurations and provide other benefits. I also learned about how Peer 1 Hosting has signed up for SDN vendor Embrane’s software to round out the Peer 1 Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offering, and I found out that SunGard has started using those same products to lower response times for its Recover2Cloud disaster-recovery enterprise cloud. The increased agility from SDN and other innovations lets SunGard promise response times that are 30 to 40 percent shorter, and the company expects to offer better service-level agreements to its own customers as a result.

Meanwhile, SDN company Nicira, which VMware acquired last year, has identified Rackspace, AT&T and DreamHost as customers. All three of those companies provide hosting services alongside other offerings.

In 1999 or thereabouts, service providers were quick to jump onto the multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) bandwagon as a way to help information travel faster on a network, said Ram Shanmugam, SunGard’s senior director of product management. Now many of those same companies are standing up as early adopters of software-defined networking.

And as that happens, it’s only natural for enterprises to witness the benefits of SDN and decide to give it a try, Shanmugam said. And thanks to SunGard’s market position, the shift could happen soon: Over 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies use SunGard for disaster recovery, Shanmugam said. Going forward, more SunGard clients could get exposed to the perks of SDN, as the company has been discussing the inclusion of SDN as well as software-defined storage for SunGard’s enterprise cloud.

More SDN products hitting the market will also speed up adoption of the technology, which virtualizes networks and enables users to automatically provision firewalls and load balancers in a few minutes — something that took an engineer hours or days to do with a hardware appliance. The vendors are ready for the demand increase, or getting closer to that point. Networking hardware vendor Juniper Networks, soon after acquiring startup Contrail Systems, announced plans to release products later this year and next year that will allow for consolidation of hardware and connect network services on multiple devices. Cisco said in November 2012 it would buy Cariden, a company that’s come up with SDN strategy. And just last week F5 Networks, another hardware vendor, acquired LineRate Systems, which is looking to help companies take on more web traffic with more easily scalable networks, as my colleague Derrick Harris wrote.

So far, the promise of better agility has been one of the best motivators for companies to try out Embrane’s SDN products, and cost savings have taken a back seat, said Dante Malagrinò, Embrane’s CEO. This is somewhat a contrast to the adoption of server virtualization, where costs savings drove adoption among enterprise customers and the benefits of agility were only perceived later.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

Big Switch Networks, an early player in software-defined networking (SDN), has secured $6.5 million in a follow-on round to his Series B venture funding from Intel Capital. It plans to use the money to add employees and clients and develop more products.

The new capital raise brings the total funding pool to more than $45 million, according to a news release. Previous backers include Goldman Sachs, Redpoint Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

The new funding points suggests that the commoditization of network hardware, which my colleague Stacey Higginbotham forecasted last week, is a few steps closer, and that Intel hopes efforts from big companies such as Cisco to tamp down the OpenFlow networking protocol are futile.

Instead Intel can take advantage of the commodification of networking gear and find a new market for chips, such as the ones designed by Fulcrum, which Intel purchased in 2011.

In November Big Switch started shipping its first products: an OpenFlow controller called the Big Network Controller; the Big Tap unified network-monitoring application; and the Big Virtual Switch, a network-virtualization application.

Intel Capital’s investment in Big Switch and Intel reflects a strategic partnership between the companies, as Intel is “really interested in getting back into the game,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and a founder of Big Switch, based in Mountain View, Calif.

With no shortage of buzz, the SDN field continues to be in flux. Last April Google disclosed that it has been testing out OpenFlow to lower the cost of communications among company data centers. And VMware’s $1.26 billion acquisition of Nicira and other deals brought on more interest in SDN. But use cases are still hard to come by. Perhaps that will change soon, now that more companies could try out Big Switch in the coming months.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• Infrastructure Overview, Q2 2010

The company is building a new very high-speed data center switch along with a software management platform. This is a really hot market — massive data center build outs have already made Arista Networks, a high-speed ethernet switch company co-founded by Andy Bechtolsheim, an IPO candidate for early 2013.  In the early-stage startup scene Nicira, a company building a controller for scaled out programmable networks, has been the victim of corporate espionage and other vendors such as Big Switch are gearing up their marketing efforts to discredit rivals.

Arista’s success (which is spearheaded by former Cisco executive Jayshree Ullal) and the threat that commodity networking gear and programmable networks poses to its business has made Cisco aware that it needs to increase its footprint in the data center business. As a result, it has put three of its senior people — Mazzola, Jain, and Cafiero — on the job. Their mission is clear — get Cisco into this market fast, and then be rewarded with millions.

Cisco has dangled the mega-million dollar carrot before and it has worked. Of course, a more politically correct way of describing the carrot is “spin-in.”  In other words, Insiemi is a company created to build a specific product, which is designed to fill a gaping hole in Cisco’s product line. The payoff for the founder trio is that Cisco will buy their startup and put millions in their pockets. It is not the first time the three musketeers have done a Cisco spin-in and laughed all the way to the bank. Andiamo Systems, a storage networking company was the first such effort. Then came Nuova Systems (which created the Nexus switch technology) which was acquired for $678 million.

Not surprisingly, Cisco is fighting a market that has already attracted many players. Arista Networks, Big Switch Networks and Nicira are some of the more well known participants in the business generically labelled “software defined networking.” There are others such as Vello Systems who are much less known, but are doing brisk business. Of the lot, Arista is the one that seems to have the potential to become the Juniper of data center business.

Understanding that they are playing catch-up, Cisco and by extension Insiemi executives have undertaken some aggressive moves that are ruffling some feathers in the small networking world. For instance, my sources say that the company is promising nearly $2 million (as an eventual pay-off) to engineers and executives who are willing switch loyalties from one of their rivals.

Correction: So far, nine of them have switched. Arista and Nicira have lost four executives each while Big Switch has lost one team member.

An earlier version of the story said that Arista and Nicira had lost four executives each to poaching by Inseimi. In fact, neither company lost any executives as part of that campaign. Inseimi rivals that include Arista, Nicira, Big Switch Networks and Cumulus Systems, have lost of a total of five engineers to the Cisco-backed rival’s poaching efforts. Other engineers at those companies were offered jobs by Inseimi, but ultimately decided not to take them. And my sources tell me that Inseimi isn’t done yet trying to recruit talent away from those companies.

As for the spin-in threesome who have a propensity for naming the “spin-in” with cute Italian names: let’s go (Andiamo), new (Nuova) and collection (insemi): here are two names they might want to consider for their future startups: pagamento (Payment) and/or ricompensa (reward.)

Here is a bit of text  from an email that is being used by a headhunter doing Insiemi’s bidding.

The thing about this new venture (beyond its technical innovation) which makes it particularly unique and rare is that it is a virtual guarantee for high financial payout to those who join especially at this early stage because of the pre-arrangement. Though the company is just a few weeks old, the NY Times is already following it..

I would like to take just a few minutes of your time to discuss the job and provide you enough info to consider it one way or another. We are pulling together a team of great people from Brocade, Google, Juniper, VMware and a host of great start ups too.

 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise

Guido Appenzeller (left) and Kyle Forster of Big Switch

Big Switch Networks, a startup using the OpenFlow protocol to help companies build software-defined networks, has open-sourced its controller software, dubbed Floodlight. The company, which is one of several startups trying to solve networking issues that arise from virtualization and webscale systems, said on Wednesday that it would release the source code for the controller it developed on its website and will focus on developing an ecosystem of applications around the Floodlight code.

The idea of software-defined networks gained ground in 2011 with companies such as Big Switch, Nicira, Embrane, Juniper and others promoting the concept of adding flexibility and agility to networks by making them programmable. Companies such as Juniper offer a proprietary flavor of this, while others promote the use of the open-source OpenFlow protocol. At its heart OpenFlow takes the intelligence required to move packets out of the switch, which actually moves the packets, and then puts them on commodity hardware.

That is all it does. So other companies are building controller software that gives the commodity server the intelligence to move packets around, while others are building firewalls, load balancers and other network applications that work in a software-defined environment. Big Switch wants to be one of those application companies, but first it wanted to put a controller out there so programmers could play with it and make it better. Then they could build applications on top of it. Kyle Forster, a co-founder at Big Switch, said in an interview, “Since networking is dominated by one big company we think it’s going to take a whole ecosystem to make a change.”

He likens the Floodlight controller to the MySQL code and says that’s what he hopes Big Switch can promote through its efforts and through its partners’ efforts — a solid core chunk of code that other companies can add functionality to. Floodlight is offered under the Apache 2.0 license used by other fast-growing projects such as Hadoop and OpenStack. With this news and Embrane’s release of its heleos software late last year, it looks like network engineers will have plenty to play with over the coming months. Perhaps this year is when software-defined networks will become real.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• How intelligent networks address enterprise cloud issues

After all, he knew he was talking to some folks who knew the answers from working in the trenches: Big Switch Networks Co-Founder and CEO Guido Appenzeller said that networking hasn’t kept up with the innovation we’ve seen in the area of server virtualization. Enterprises now need half an hour to deploy a new server, he explained. Reconfiguring the network, on the other hand, takes an employee two days.

Nicira Networks CTO Martin Casado chimed in saying that this isn’t just too much time, but it also leads to too many errors. “Having a human in the loop to get work done is a really bad thing,” he said. And Embrane CEO Dante Malagrinò concluded that networks have become too static to work with the requirements of dynamic cloud architectures. “One of the big problems is the lack of programmability of the network,” he said.

OpenFlow, which is based on work done at Stanford University and intends to make networks smarter and more flexible, can be part of solving these issues. However, Casado cautioned that the technology won’t bring about world peace and solve all of our networking problems in the process. “OpenFlow is kind of hot and sexy, and people are talking about it a lot,” he said, adding that the real pioneers of network virtualization are Cisco and VMWare, which aren’t going to adopt OpenFlow any time soon.

Speaking of incumbents: Appenzeller said that big companies are warming up to newer approaches of network virtualization, in part because they’re forced to keep up with pressure from other sectors of the industry. He said that he sees an open warfare going on between network, storage and computing vendors to define the future of the cloud, and concluded: “It’s an incredibly exciting time for networking right now.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The promise of software-defined networking
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

Here are some highlights from the presentations:

• Acunu CEO Tim Moreton demonstrated how his company helps enterprises achieve “consistently and predictably higher performance” from their commodity hardware systems. Acunu’s technology combines storage stack pipeline into a single platform, promising less latency and more range read throughput.
• Beyondcore CEO Arijit Sengupta described how his San Mateo-based company helps clients utilize the cloud as much as possible by ensuring the privacy and security of their sensitive data. Beyondcore’s SplitSecure technology splits–and later recombines — private information from the more general data that can be stored in the cloud.
• BigSwitch co-founder Kyle Forster demonstrated his company’s Open Flow-based technology platform that purportedly brings the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization to the networking space. According to Forster, the Palo Alto, California-based BigSwitch aims to become the “VMware of networking.”
• Cloudability, led by CEO Mat Ellis, provides a web-based dashboard that allows companies to see all their cloud costs in one place. The Portland, Oregon-based startup, which sends its clients alerts when its cloud spending spikes, aims to be “the Mint.com for the cloud.”
• CloudFloor CTO Imad Mouline demonstrated the company’s cloud management and optimization service. The Waltham, Massachusetts-based company has built its service to help both IT and business people get control and visibility over their cloud operations.
• DotCloud CEO Solomon Hyes described his company’s platform-as-a-service offering, that allows developers to run any major application or database stack in the cloud, regardless of the programming language or database it utilizes. The San Francisco-based startup received both the judge’s choice and audience choice awards for its Structure Launchpad presentation.
• GenieDB founder Dr. Jack Kreindler described how his company aims to solve large-scale distributed data problems with its geodiverse datafabric. The Orange County, Calif.-based startup has developed a datafabric that combines SQL and NoSQL for platform-as-a-service providers and cloud builders.
• PHP Fog founder and CEO Lucas Carlson talked about his Portland, Oregon-based company’s platform-as-a-service technology aimed at PHP developers. PHP Fog hopes to drastically reduce the time it takes for developers to build an application, potentially helping them save time and money upfront and system and scaling costs over time.
• Real-Status CEO Royce Murphy demonstrates his company’s modeling and visualization software product HyperGlance. The Cambridge, UK-based company purportedly helps companies visualize their experience in moving and hosting their data in the cloud.
• vCider CEO Chris Marino shows off his company’s on-demand distributed virtual switch product for the cloud. vCider works as a self-service overlay on top of existing networking structures.
• Zerto CEO Ziv Kedem launches the company out of stealth mode, announcing its technology for ensuring disaster recovery in the cloud. Zerto aims to help companies feel more comfortable with moving critical applications to the cloud by ensuring business continuity and disaster recovery by replicating data in a virtualized, hyper-visor layer.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• The promise of software-defined networking