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

• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight

How did you become interested in open source and community building?

I was contributing to an open source web publishing system for digital archives called Omeka. The primary goal of Omeka is to make publishing digital archives of historical photographs and stories as easy as publishing a blog. We patterned our community strategy around Mozilla and WordPress, trying to create a ladder of contributions where people of varying skill levels could get involved, and I was helping coordinate developer community growth. Shortly after launching our first public beta, we realized that the community of interested users was more diverse than we imagined, not only from museums and archives but also libraries.

For me, community building began mostly as a way of understanding and negotiating the differences and needs of these institutions. You need direct, personal connections with your users in order to understand their needs; in the process, you start to draw connections between the work of others and play a role of matchmaker.

My interest in community building led me to help co-found THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, an un-conference. THATCamp is a BarCamp-style event, bringing together technologists and humanists to create sessions related to digital humanities. Sessions vary from event to event, but my favorites have always been ones that focus on building. And since 2008, there have been over 100 THATCamp events around the world.

You’re involved in open web projects through the Mozilla Foundation, right?

I’ve been working as an Integration Engineer Contractor with the Open Badges team at Mozilla, mostly helping third-party developers integrate with APIs to create and display badges. Open Badges is a standard to recognize learning online through the open sharing of digital badges, It’s an exciting approach to informal learning and using badges as a way to capture achievements that are otherwise not visible on a resume.

One of my contributions to the project has been creating several WordPress plugins to make it easier to issue and display badges; it’s important that a variety of platforms adopt the standard to give the community a variety of ways to hook into our infrastructure.

You’re also interested in hacking hardware, such as drones. What has this taught you about coding?

This semester I helped organize a group of fellow graduate students at UC Berkeley to form what we’ve called “Drone Lab”, an informal group that has met weekly to hack, discuss, and investigate creative and problem-solving uses of consumer-grade quadcopters. These are hobbyist toys that you can buy at your local shopping mall, but the ability to control them using software that you script unleashes the potential to tap into their cameras and sensors from heights and hard-to-reach places that are new and exciting. What we ended up focusing our hacking on were new ways to control the quadcopters, including voice and tracking head movements.

What I found fascinating the last several months was introducing several of my classmates to Node.JS through programming these drones. Learning to program can often be a frustrating and unrewarding experience, but with just a proper development environment and a few lines of Javascript, you can fly a copter. Programming shouldn’t be limited to terminal windows, and the feedback of seeing the drone fly can be very rewarding. This also fosters creativity and unexpected things – sometimes you’ll see the drone do something in flight that seems odd, which prompts new questions about your code and experimentation that can be less common in programming.

So were you part of last year’s TacoCopter stunt?

TacoCopter is a project that I’m not involved with; I believe it’s meant to be more of a joke than a real thing. Still, there’s something intriguing and futuristic about a flying robot delivering Mexican food that gets people’s attention. We joke a lot about delivering tacos via drones.

What do you see on the horizon for programming and the open source movement?

In the age of GitHub where it’s easy for anyone to share code online and gain a following, the proliferation of projects both big and small can come at the expense of a clear way to integrate various codebases together. In my experience, it’s often the “glue code” and examples that are most valuable to users who want to use your software; the last 10 percent, so to speak. To be effective in open source community building, understanding those needs of integration is crucial and something I’ll be spending a lot of time working on.

In general, I’m excited to see more companies using and releasing open source software, not for the goal of selling it but in an effort to develop better services and give back to communities that they benefit from. The precise model for how this software will be supported, grown, managed, and sustained is still to be defined; these are often projects without a software foundation. I hope to see more coordination and partnerships among companies regarding open source contributions.

Finally, what’s next after you finish your Master’s?

I’ll be joining Twitter as an Open Source Advocate in June. I’ll be responsible for building relationships with communities to drive adoption of our open source projects and APIs. Twitter has over 100 open source projects, and as an organization has made a big investment in using and releasing open source software.

time to make it official with a tweet: in June I am joining @twitteross as an Open Source Advocate. I’m pumped!

— Dave Lester (@davelester) May 8, 2013

Images via OpenBadges.org, UC Berkeley School of Information

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

• The 2013 task management tools market
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012

Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, talked about the tensions between individuals wanting to monetize their work and the broader value they can create by making their content available to everyone.

“I think there’s an area of our economy that’s really not studied enough, or it’s not thought about enough. What happens when people give things to each other without getting paid? Think about the revolution with YouTube,” he said, pointing to children choosing between a Disney cartoon or a video created by another child that was uploaded to the site. “From the point of view of a director who wants to get paid, that’s a negative thing, but from the point of view of the consumer, that’s a positive thing.”

O’Reilly pointed out that some people might think that free material, once widely circulated, would make it hard for others to eventually make money, but that might not be the case:

“Businesses do arise. The world wide web and open source software turned into Google and Facebook and Apple building all this incredible technology that they were able to monetize. So I’m interested in this economic activity that comes from this open source and open sharing. What does it tell us about the possibility of new jobs?”

These issues are very much at play when looking at companies like Twitter, which started with a free product embraced by a geeky, early-adopter audience and is trying to become a mainstream media business. O’Reilly cited the idea that once an item becomes free something else becomes necessarily more valuable. But Jeremy Howard, president and chief scientist at Kaggle, said he thinks for most creative types, there doesn’t have to be high demand for a product to keep them going:

“I’ve been coding every day for 30 years,” he said. “The idea that unless you create scarcity around intellectual property or creators will stop creating, is just crazy.”

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

• Open-Source Startups Follow Red Hat’s Path To Profit
• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

Parnafes, who is based in Israel, was previously a partner who led Battery’s investment in Delphix, a company that makes software to virtualize databases. Parnafes was also on the board of XtremIO prior to its acquisition by EMC. “The guys keep asking me if our investment in enterprise IT is done yet, but there’s still a lot of opportunity here,” says Parnafes.

Itzik Parnafes

Battery has been one of the more active venture firms investing in the hardware and infrastructure side of our broadband-influenced and consumer web-obsessed culture with investments in Calxeda, the ARM-server company, Anobit, the flash memory firm that Apple purchased, and Cumulus Networks, a company rethinking switches. It has made more than 20 investments over the past five years in enterprise IT, and put more than $240 million in.

What’s going on in enterprise IT–or, frankly, IT.

For every Facebook and Pinterest there are hordes of servers and IT personnel trying to figure out how to scale these web-based businesses at costs that still enable them to make money. On the web, your infrastructure and software are the raw materials that comprise your cost of goods sold, so many of these firms are looking to make their infrastructure cheap and elastic.

Some buy from cloud providers like Amazon, while others graduate to hosting their own servers and building their own data centers. But this trend hasn’t exactly been a boon for the legacy IT guys as open-source software and commodity hardware have been deployed across hundreds of thousands of feet of raised floor inside data centers. Scale breaks things, and in the last five years venture firms have been investing in software and hardware that helps bridge the gap between legacy and a new hyperscale architecture.

But as Parnafes says, there is still opportunity, and that opportunity is in rethinking the architecture itself. Google is doing it with a team of secretive scientists, as are some in the cloud and high performance computing world. Once you build a compute architecture that’s elastic and on-demand, the physical infrastructure constraints — which remains inelastic and isn’t deployed on demand — become a source of pain.

Peace, love and interoperability in next-gen IT

It’s like once you move to a house in the suburbs you realize that you love the lawn and schools, but you hate the commute. Computing and data centers are now realizing the time they spend provisioning and futzing with the hardware is their equivalent of a long commute. Hence the current vogue for software-defined everything, the rise of Mellanox, which can support both Infiniband and Ethernet networks, and even the purchase of Xsigo by Orcale. The end goal here is a compute architecture that can be just as adaptive as the virtualized services built on top of them. What’s more, workloads and data will be able to flow from one data center (or cloud) to another seamlessly.

“These are the prime motives that direct our thinking: what will be in the next generation data center,” Parnafes says.”Look at every constraint you encounter today and try to eliminate them, and if you identify such a technology you have a possible winner on your side.”

Parnafes acknowledges that we may never get to this boundary-less world, but he suggests that regulations as opposed to technology or business models will be what stands in the way. To bolster this idea, he points to the CIOs of large banks which have seen the cost efficiencies of running an Amazon-style compute cloud and are trying to emulate Amazon’s costs structure and elasticity as opposed to buying into some vendor-defined private cloud model.

“It’s kind of an ironic twist,” Parnafes said. “In the past the public clouds wanted to emulate the private data centers to make people feel comfortable and now the private ones want to emulate the public clouds which have very efficient model for people to run their [compute] jobs.” So as these worlds not only collide, but are coming together in some sort of software-defined and virtualized lovechild, startups that can help ease that transition should give Parnafes a call.

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

• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises

Gary Morgenthaler, partner at Morgenthaler Ventures.

The database category hasn’t been all that exciting over the past 20 years, with market leaders Oracle, IBM,  Microsoft, Sybase (now SAP trading off incremental updates every year or so. But that period of stasis ended with the advent of cloud computing, open source software and big data — a perfect storm that reinvigorated the field.

Now NuoDB, a new-look database company that seeks to take advantage of that convergence is taking in $10 million in Series B funding, led by Morgenthaler Ventures with additional contributions from existing backers Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners. The company also added database pioneer Gary Morgenthaler, a partner at Morgenthaler Ventures, to its board, joining another database luminary, Hummer Winblad partner Mitchell Kertzman.

Morgenthaler co-founded Ingres, an early relational database software company and co-founded Illustra with Michael Stonebraker a serial database entrepreneur who is now CTO of VoltDb. Illustra was sold to Informix which was in turn bought by IBM for $1 billion.  Morgenthaler has also invested in Siri, Nuance Communications and Nominum. The $10 million cash infusion — which brings total funding to $12 million — will be used to expand the current beta beyond 700 testers and bring the product to market in the fall, according to NuoDB CEO Barry Morris.

In a recent interview, Morgenthaler told me that he’d tracked databases since the sale of Informix in 1986 but really hadn’t seen anything of note. Until now.

“Honestly, I had not found anything sufficiently compelling to get me to re-enter a field I’d had success in. NuoDB is something different in terms of architecture and technology and the potential it represents is a quantum step forward, If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t invest because I want an unblemished record,” he said with a laugh.

SQL, NoSQL, whatever

While NuoDB is often lumped in with NewSQL databases, Morris quibbles with that characterization. ”SQL is just one personality for us. We can be NoSQL or SQL, the innovation we have is much deeper,” Morris told me in a recent interview. He likens NuoDB to BitTorrent in the way it divvies up the task at hand to any number of processors — avoiding bottlenecks — but somehow managing to keep all that data organized, accessible and safe.

“Every database from Oracle to DB2 to SQL Server and including MongoDB and Couch has the same core architecture, which is to manage a file on a disk. That means concurrent access to that file is a problem — you cannot scale. For us, the disk is at the edge of the picture and we get away from that central control of everything,” Morris said.

The other analogy Morris likes to use to explain NuoDB’s is the flock of birds flying in formation: “No single bird is the brain, no one bird is in charge,” he said. “Every bird does something simple, but doesn’t even know how many birds are in the flock or where the flock is going. The bird just knows, ‘If the bird on the right flies toward me, I fly a little bit left’. The idea is, you can have lots of simple things collaborating.”

Following that model, NuoDB can distribute that task to any number of processors across geographies as needed, Morris said.

That the Cambridge, Ma.-based startup, one of several hot database companies around Boston,  has been able to draw from the ranks of premier database talent– including Morgenthaler and Kertzman — is a testament to this idea. And to NuoDB’s founder and CTO Jim Starkey, a Digital Equipment Corp. veteran who went on to develop the Interbase database. He is considered a database superstar.

Database allstars

Kertzman, like Morgenthaler, thought he was through with databases when he left Sybase in 1998 and joined Hummer Winblad five years later. “Let’s face it, databases got boring,” he said.

But, Morris was able to sell him on NuoDB.  ”We looked at a lot of new database companies and didn’t invest until Jim and Barry got my attention. Jim is probably one of the top five database scientists [in the world] and this is one category where experience really matters. Not just technical experience but understanding what a SQL online transaction processing [OLTP] database needs to do, ” Kertzman said. “Unless you’ve been in this business you might think a database is a list of features but it’s really demanding. The difference between a pretty good database and one that people will build their business on is pretty big.”

Morgenthaler said NuoDB is just what the era of cloud computing and big data calls for. What is needed, he said, are “massive scale, horizontal scaleout systems that are largely self organizing with modern management tools around them and that have very flexible architectures that allow you to adapt to the application while its running.  [And they need to] run globally distributed in a way that’s flexible to change, change in the size of database needed and the number of nodes running,” he noted, while acknowledging that’s a very tall order.

“Things like Hadoop or Cassandra are great, but developers need choice. We looked at this and said it’s what the market needs.”

Feature photograph courtesy of Flickr user chucka_nc

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

• A near-term outlook for big data
• 9 Companies that Pushed the Infrastructure Discussion in 2010
• The Red-Hot Data Warehouse Market: Who’s Buying Next?

For years, Oracle wowed Wall Street with its fat margins on software licenses and maintenance. The fact was, many large companies depended on Oracle relational databases and paid what it took to keep them running. They still do.

Oracle’s problem is that relational doesn’t go far enough in the era of big data, which requires the handling of unstructured, semi-structured and all manner of information from Twitter, Facebook, server logs, you name it. And, for once, Oracle can’t jam all that stuff into the relational mold. Instead, it launched a Cloudera-based Big Data appliance, in January.

While the pricing was low compared to what analysts expected, it’s still a big “scale-up” sort of appliance. List price for the Big Data Appliance is $450,000 plus another $54,000 for hardware maintenance and $36,000 for operating systems maintenance. That’s a lot less than the Oracle Exadata appliances, but it’s still a significant outlay. You can buy a ton of standard X86 boxes — the sort of gear typically used for big data crunching –for that kind of money.

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

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Real-­time query for Hadoop democratizes access to big data analytics
• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization

As part of the Citrix announcement, Sameer Dholakia, their general manager of cloud platforms said:

“….we believe the biggest winners in the Cloud Era will be clouds built on a platform that is designed from the ground up with a true Amazon-style architecture, proven at scale in real production clouds, compatible with the Amazon architecture and fully committed to open source. With the significant momentum CloudStack has gained….it is the only cloud platform on the market that even comes close to meeting these requirements.”

Of course, this is a shot across the bows for VMware, but most pundits, bloggers, and journalists focused, somewhat rightfully, on what it will mean for OpenStack.

But what does this statement mean? How much is real, and how much is marketing-speak? What does it mean for VMware and OpenStack? What does it do for Citrix’s strategy?

Before digging into these questions, I want to make clear that I am absolutely biased. Cloudscaling, the company I cofounded, is a longstanding member of the OpenStack community, and the company’s Open Cloud OS is based on OpenStack software.

I’m also in a better position to understand the reality here. Working with KT in 2010 and 2011, Cloudscaling designed and built one of the largest CloudStack deployments to date. Working with a global top 10 carrier in 2011 and 2012, Cloudscaling helped them kick off one of the largest OpenStack deployments to date.

Parsing the quote

Citrix makes several claims:

• Winners in the “Cloud Era” will be “designed from the ground up with a true Amazon-style architecture”
• These winners are “proven at scale in real production clouds”
• The winners are also “compatible with the Amazon architecture”
• The winners are “fully committed to open source”

Many of these claims seem to focus on “Amazon-style architecture” and Citrix’s right to claim the mantle of Amazon-ness:

“[CloudStack] is the only cloud platform on the market that even comes close to meeting these requirements.”

A bold claim, but is it true? Eucalyptus would claim otherwise and I won’t be bashful in saying that I think our OpenStack-powered Open Cloud OS will be more compatible with Amazon in every way when compared to Citrix. Vanilla OpenStack can also make similar claims.

So, what is “Amazon-style” and what is “compatible”?

Amazon-style architecture

There are a number of ways to interpret “Amazon-style,” but to be meaningful, we can assume that an amount of Amazon compatibility is implied. If “Amazon-style” means inexpensive, it means nothing. Anyone can build a cheap cloud.

Fortunately, Citrix provides a way forward when they also claim “compatible with the AWS architecture,” a more clear-cut claim.

AWS compatibility

What does AWS compatibility mean? Surely it means more than ordering virtual machines on demand. If not, then every cloud is “AWS compatible.” It must mean more. AWS-style networking, storage, and compute? Similar hypervisors, perhaps, given Citrix is the owner of Xen? Perhaps, it’s just providing AWS API compatibility?

How is an “Amazon-style architecture” compatible with AWS? Well, for most, I think it’s about replicating Amazon’s architecture (or, at least, elements of it) besides the APIs.

CloudStack versus AWS

I have heard that many of today’s CloudStack deployments were influenced by the architecture Cloudscaling designed at KT. This architecture involved the following key elements:

• Scalable layer-2 hardware virtual area network (VLAN) using Arista switches
• Local, in-rack storage area network using NexentaStor
• XenServer clusters
• CloudStack as the VM control system
• Cloudscaling’s provisioning system and accompanying chef recipes
• Cloudscaling’s methodology for building hardware blueprints
• Supporting open source software for monitoring, logging and related functions

Now let’s examine these elements and related technology differences between AWS and CloudStack.

Hardware VLANs are not AWS native networking

Obviously, standard AWS doesn’t provide hardware VLANs in its architecture. The closest capability that is a cloud service provided by AWS is Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). However, it’s not their default networking but an add-on. The default AWS networking is a flat layer-3 network, which CloudStack can support, but typically does not. Much of their value-added functionality (e.g. load balancing, network area translation) disappears when using flat networking. Default CloudStack deployments aren’t network compatible with AWS. Maybe you could claim that they’re compatible with AWS VPC, but even that is a bit of a stretch (more on that below).

AWS EBS is not a SAN

AWS Elastic Compute Cloud doesn’t use SAN storage for standard VMs, although it does provide a similar type of capability in Elastic Block Storage (EBS). Instead, EC2 provides primarily direct-attached storage (DAS) that is surfaced as ephemeral storage for each VM. No guarantees are provided around the persistency of local VM storage. This is in contrast to standard CloudStack, which typically uses XenServer clusters and persistent storage to provide high availability (HA) for a VM, where a VM is guaranteed to never be lost.

Clearly, this is different from AWS, which means the storage architecture for CloudStack is different. OpenStack, in comparison, uses a default storage model which is exactly like AWS.

Xen is XenServer?

AWS doesn’t use XenServer, but has their own customized version of Xen. This is close enough that we can call it the same. If “Amazon-style” and “AWS compatible” means the Xen hypervisor, Citrix claims are good; however, anyone running Xen is now AWS compatible.

1999 called and wants its application architecture back

CloudStack is a single monolithic piece of Java code. Most of the code resides in a single .jar file and runs on a single Java app server by default. This is a common architecture — from 1999. As you might expect, AWS has much more software, mostly written in a distributed service-oriented-architecture (SOA) fashion. The core software architecture is not similar at all between AWS and CloudStack.

CloudStack’s code focuses on features desirable in smaller deployments such as HA or high-availability of VMs (a common request in VPS-type environments that is irrelevant for customers who use DevOps-style automation). Amazon doesn’t provide HA for VMs. You can boot a VM off of a persistent EBS volume, but that is about as close as you can get. Again, this is dissimilar in architecture and capability.

Advanced networking in CloudStack and AWS

Regarding advanced networking capabilities in CloudStack that are comparable to AWS EC2 and VPC, the picture is rather bleak. When deployed with hardware VLANs, the CloudStack networking model depends on providing a router-VM for every customer. This router-VM provides networking functionality such as NAT, routing, load balancing and DHCP. All router-VMs are a certain size (number of cores, amount of RAM, etc.). The size of the router-VM directly impacts amount of throughput and number of TCP sessions possible through the load balancing software.

At KT, we did a significant amount of tuning of the router-VMs to support bigger deployments. This is problematic in that if all router-VMs are upsized, to say 2GB RAM with 2vCores, you give up significant capacity. If downsized to something smaller, they are unable to provide acceptable performance. It’s impossible to right-size these router-VMs or to scale them dynamically.

Regardless, this is nothing like Amazon. Amazon uses edge networking services that are horizontally scalable and are multi-tenanted rather than one router VM per customer.

CloudStack’s native API is not AWS compatible

The CloudStack API is not AWS compatible. Instead CloudStack provides a piece of software, called CloudBridge, that is installed co-resident with CloudStack. CloudBridge translates AWS EC2 API calls to CloudStack native API calls.

CloudBridge only provides EC2, not S3. In this regard, stacks like Eucalyptus and OpenStack provide more AWS API capability by providing both EC2 and S3 APIs. How then is CloudStack “the only cloud platform on the market,” “designed from the ground up with a true Amazon-style architecture” and “AWS compatibility”?

There are additional issues with Citrix’s claims that CloudStack was designed from the ground up with an Amazon-style architecture. It’s not even close nor can it be without a ground-up re-write.

Where does CloudStack play?

Given this comparison, it doesn’t sound very good for CloudStack. Yes, CloudStack has a number of deployments and traction. It’s been very successful. However, when we see customers choosing CloudStack, they are almost never building an AWS-style open cloud. Instead, they want a cheaper Vblock.

CloudStack, if anything, is an open source attack on VCE and VMware that is largely irrelevant in the open cloud space. When talking to other OpenStack-based open cloud vendors, they tell me that CloudStack is rarely competing against their products except when customers don’t understand the difference between an enterprise-style cloud and an open cloud.

If you want a cheaper VCE Vblock, I think CloudStack is a great option. If you want an open cloud that is AWS compatible for both architecture and APIs, CloudStack is a terrible option. OpenStack is a true open cloud solution. It has more architectural affinity with AWS than CloudStack.

Bringing reality to the unreal

No one should be under the illusion that CloudStack is more AWS/Amazon compatible than any other open source cloud software. Eucalyptus and OpenStack have similar or better claims to AWS compatibility.

To suggest otherwise is misleading.

Randy Bias is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Cloudscaling, which provides an OpenStack-powered open cloud solution with support for AWS and Rackspace APIs.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Radio Saigón.

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

• Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

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

• How search can unlock the power of big data
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The importance of putting the U and I in visualization

The Oculus Surveillance and Telepresence Netbook Robot project is looking to secure $15,000 in pledges by Jan. 31. You can commit as little as $30 for an Oculus T-Shirt, $225 for a full robot kit (netbook not included) or $420 for a deluxe robot made of wood, complete with a headlight, T-shirt — for you, not the robot — and RoboRealm software. Even with the largest pledge, you’ll have to provide a netbook.

Although I’m a robot enthusiast, this project makes perfect sense. Netbooks are cheap enough and have more than enough horsepower and sensors to power a robot. I suspect that while many netbook owners still use their device as a traditional laptop, others have moved on to tablets or other mobile devices. That means an old netbook collecting dust can gain a second life.

Using the netbook’s webcam, an Arduino board and open source software, the Oculus could work well as an inexpensive ”place shifting” solution. The robot’s owner can remotely move the robot and see what the it sees, while communicating with other people over the web through a netbook’s integrated microphone and speakers. The Oculus even has a charging dock that it can back into on its own.

Note that this isn’t the first netbook-powered robot potentially hitting the market. Willow Garage has long offered the TurtleBot that combines a netbook with a Roomba iCrate base and an Xbox Kinect. As a result, you’ll pay much more for that solution; $1399 for a full kit including the netbook.

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

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Will cloud computing push the BRIC market to the front?
• Why the big data startup boom will likely be short-lived

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
• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise