The project, in a presentation by Frank Frankovsy at Interop, said it was taking a slightly different tack with its design, deciding to get input from others before actually making and releasing the hardware to the community. However, just because the hardware isn’t designed yet, Facebook isn’t going to twiddle its thumbs for a traditional multi-year design cycle. Frankovsky told me in an interview that he expects the hardware to b out in 9 to 12 months.

“We have built these islands of openness in the data center but the last element, and the one that was connecting the compute and storage, was the network,” said Frankovsky. “And there is a lot of pent-up passion out there for breaking open this appliance model.”

Networking is the last bastion of proprietary profits

Prepare to be disaggregated, switch!

For those who don’t dwell in data centers, the top-of-rack switch is the networking gear that sits on the top of a rack of servers directing traffic between those boxes and between the other racks in the data center. While the networking world is all aflutter over the promise of OpenFlow and software-defined networking, very little real progress has been made in building switches for the webscale data center.

Google, a few years back, had famously issued a request for a new type of switch that would fit its very specific scaled-out needs and no one responded. Now the search giant makes its own hardware. But soon after that, Andy Bechtolsheim saw the need for Google-like speeds and scale and started Arista, a switch company that has dominated in the webscale, financial and high-performance switching space. Meanwhile, at the lower end, Cisco’s cheaper Nexus line of switches have done really well.

Facebook’s Najam Ahmad.

Yet, these options aren’t palatable for Frankovsky or Najam Ahmad of Facebook (Ahmad will be at our Structure conference in June discussing more about Facebook’s networking strategy). On the existing product side, Frankovsky is frustrated by hardware that doesn’t play nicely at scale. He specifically mentioned that the side venting of heat on switches means he can’t place them right next to another switch. Ahmad, who is in charge of the social-networking giant’s network, is concerned about getting out of the proprietary OS model.

“We want it to be OS-agnostic so we can use one from our existing provider or build our own,” he said. He added that he’d prefer an open Linux-based implementation. These proprietary OSes — Cisco has IOS, Juniper has Junos and Arista has EOS — are one of the reasons that companies are locked into one networking gear provider. They are also stuck using proprietary code to make changes.

Who will be the Red Hat of the networking OS?

Networking cables along the ceiling at Facebook HQ.

If you are chock full of technically savvy people, losing the agility that comes from writing your own code as well as paying higher prices for the proprietary hardware and software combination is probably maddening. Hence Facebook’s interest in the open source OS. Of course, building out the underlying hardware is only the first step, the next will be supporting an OS that runs on top of that system.

While Facebook might build its own OS, not every company will want to do that, and Facebook may not open source its own networking OS if it ever makes one. That leaves a market opportunity. Perhaps a firm like Arista might move in here with an open source version of EOS, although given that Arista uses merchant silicon in its boxes, putting up an open-source version of its software would eat into its margins.

This is neither Open Flow nor SDN

But let’s go back to the box. Facebook is working with Broadcom, Intel, The Open Daylight Foundation, the Open Networking Foundation and Big Switch as some of its collaborators on this project. The box itself might run x86 hardware or a proprietary ASIC, according to Frankovsky. As for the protocols, Open Compute is going to see what the other collaborators want.

Software-defined networking

But for those wondering about Open Flow support, it’s likely. Frankovsky said that the Open Networking Foundation asked Facebook to get involved via the Open Compute Project with making open networking hardware. While Frankovsky and Ahmad didn’t cop to it, I know there has been frustration in many areas of the webscale and networking world that the promise of commodity hardware that Open Flow could offer has not really hit the market in a way that offers the most flexibility for data center operators.

Frankovsky said that the ONF approached Open Compute (Facebook is a founding member of both organizations) in part because it believed it could move quickly on this. And it will. But it’s worth noting that this announcement is about an open source top-of-rack switch, not a controller and not some type of software-defined networking play.

Other companies may take this box and perhaps an open source OS if one is developed, and then layer on some type of controller software to make a software-defined network, but this is just a box.

That being said, this is a box that could seriously disrupt the existing players in networking, from giants like Cisco and Dell all the way to smaller startups like NoviFlow or even Pica8. Much like Facebook is changing the server market with Open Compute, we’ll see if it can tweak the model and do the same in networking.

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More and more IT people are coming to understand and express interest in implementing OpenFlow, which separates the control plane from the data plane and lets servers take charge of telling switches what to do with packets. As the trend takes hold, NoviFlow will surely have to put up with fierce competition, as more vendors move to make their switches OpenFlow-compatible and as OpenFlow-friendly code from the OpenDaylight Project hits the market.

The news comes a year after NoviFlow was founded and just a few months after NoviFlow promised switches that could deliver 100 Gbps. Clearly NoviFlow is serious about capturing marketshare as enterprises consider OpenFlow options and at least think about moving away from legacy vendors such as Cisco.

Cisco, of course, downplays the threat to its bread-and-butter business and is taking steps to protect its market-leading position in switches and routers and enviable profit margins.

“I don’t see this (software-defined networking and network-function virtualization) as a commoditization threat whatsoever to Cisco,” said David Ward, Cisco’s chief technology officer for engineering and chief architect, during a call with investors on Thursday. Startups like NoviFlow are hoping to prove Ward wrong.

This story was updated at 9:03 a.m. PT to clarify the potential speed of NoviFlow switches.

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Rumored in recent months, the project begins more than two years after the establishment of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which counts customers such as Facebook and Google as board members and has nurtured the OpenFlow protocol. OpenDaylight organizers describe the vendor-led consortium as a nice complement to the ONF that will support OpenFlow, but it’s hard to predict how nicely the organizations will really dovetail with one another.

OpenDaylight is taking proposals for code from engineers working inside and outside the sponsoring companies. The software line will include an open controller, plugins, applications, a virtual overlay and interfaces to bring all those elements together, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. Those elements will sit on top of OpenFlow, as well as vendor-specific interfaces and other standard protocols, which work on top of virtual and physical switches.

Elements of the OpenDaylight Project

Different sponsors are proposing different parts of the total OpenDaylight product line. All contributions must be approved by a steering committee. The first OpenDaylight code is slated to ship in the third quarter of this year.

OpenDaylight says it intends to play nice with the ONF. But it’s unclear if that will actually happen. There are competing visions, for example, for the northbound API. The ONF believes there should not be a standard, while OpenDaylight will be shipping standard northbound APIs. Meanwhile, there are lots of SDN startups not sponsoring OpenDaylight, so it’s hard to tell what those companies will do.

OpenDaylight’s stated goal — widening the adoption of and sparking more innovation around software-defined networking — is noble. Vendors’ acknowledgment that the network indeed must become as dynamic and programmable as compute and storage is right on point. Whether OpenDaylight will cripple SDN startups’ efforts to help companies swap out expensive brand-name gear for cheaper commodity equipment is an open question. To be sure, though, the establishment of OpenDaylight is a turning point, and the SDN hype ensures that lots of people will be eager to see what actually comes to pass.

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Mellanox, primarily an Infiniband vendor, recently started gaining wins on the Ethernet side as well. Its history of providing networking gear and silicon for the highly-distributed and IO-intensive high-performance computing market has given it something of an edge in certain scale-out deployments. So the news that it’s trying to drive the creation of an Open Ethernet initiative makes sense. It’s listening to its customers and attempting to position itself as the replacement to traditional networking gear for the scale out and software-defined networking era.

According to an EETimes article, Mellanox won’t open source its firmware drivers for its chips and so will retain its proprietary edge on the silicon. Once again, it’s clear that server and now networking gear is getting stripped down to its most basic construction, where the primary hardware value is in the silicon and whatever software runs on top of it. On the server side, the value of that software has slowly been driven down by open-source alternatives, but on the networking side that process is just beginning.

Mellanox, like others in the space who have offered OpenFlow switches or APIs to their networking gear, has now announced its strategy for dealing with the threat open-source software poses to networking. Will it find partners and customers willing to buy into that vision?

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The company has been providing wide area networking optimization products for telecommunications companies, optical gear and variety of other products in its 13-year history, but in conjunction with its funding it has launched a software-defined networking product designed to connect multiple data centers. In much the same vein of Google connecting its data centers using OpenFlow, or firms like NTT or Calligo connecting their data centers using Nicira’s software, BTI hopes to also help network providers make multiple data centers look and behave more like one.

BTI is offering a chassis-based product (it’s a big box) that customers put in their data centers network and connect via fiber to other BTI boxes in other data centers. BTI expects to announce customers using the product in the second quarter of 2013. The idea behind layering a software defined network between data centers is that it gives operators granular control on how they can route traffic between data centers based on customers and their service level agreements, but it can also lower costs associated with networking.

The promise BTI offers is that operators might not have to over provision to the extent they do today, because they can better manage their traffic and charge for bandwidth based on need. If packets don’t need to travel during peaks times, then the operator has the ability now to use pricing or service level agreements to move a customer’s traffic to less congested periods. To be clear, these customers are not consumers, but corporations that are buying bandwidth.

The vision here is for a telco-grade SDN offering for service providers and big content companies that own their own networks, but that don’t have the engineering talent or the interest in building their own boxes and code to do this. Despite the excitement around SDN inside the data center, using some type of software defined networking between data centers is actually gaining adherents just as quickly — if not more quickly.

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A subsidiary of the NTT Group, NTT Communications announced its enterprise cloud by way of data centers in Hong Kong and Japan in June 2012. It was billed as “the world’s first cloud service to incorporate OpenFlow,” according to a news release. OpenFlow is a protocol for separating packet forwarding from routing decisions, which can be moved from a switch to a different controller. Such separation has the potential to lower the cost of equipment and create interoperable gear that would allow buyers to program their network infrastructure without resorting to proprietary and complex programming options created by the networking gear vendor.

Since last June, data centers in California, Virginia and Singapore have joined the NTT Communications lineup, and facilities in Australia, Malaysia and Thailand will come online in March, according to a news release.

The new data centers will also use software-defined networking to give NTT and its clients more agility and lower costs. Implementing network virtualization in the data centers enables more flexible and automated configuration changes to the network connecting a customer’s servers, even across multiple data centers, according to a presentation NTT Communications executive Yukio Ito gave at last year’s Open Networking Summit.

NTT isn’t completely new to SDN. Last year it was named as a customer of Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform, as my colleague Stacey Higginbotham reported. The company was using Nicira controllers to move data sets from data center to data center following the earthquake off the Japanese coast that triggered a tsunami and led to subsequent nuclear accidents.

While NTT is making a statement with its expansion of SDN-enabled data centers, other companies that run colocation or cloud facilities for enterprises, such as Rackspace and AT&T, could follow suit with similar offerings soon. After all, both of those companies are also Nicira customers, and hosting companies are popular targets for SDN deployments.

In any case, the rush to deploy software-defined networking in production environments will continue, especially after such a large vendor has gone public. Stacey predicted last month that 2013 would be the year big companies will see that their efforts to prevent network-hardware commoditization are doomed to fail.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user bandarji.

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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.

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Software-defined networking doesn’t require OpenFlow. And it will still make a network programmable and responsive in ways that both scaled-out web-services providers and enterprise customers dealing with virtualization will appreciate. But it won’t necessarily affect the underlying networking hardware in the same way OpenFlow can. However, OpenFlow — the protocol that aims to separate the intelligence required to route a packet from the act of moving a packet– can commoditize the switches and routers. And it will have a big impact on the networking vendors such as Cisco, Arista and Juniper.

SDN is good for many things, but not everything.

Nick McKeown, one of the fathers of OpenFlow onstage at Structure.

But it’s early: the promise of real, commodity-based networking gear will not dissipate. Stu Bailey, the CTO of Infoblox told me last week as his company was launching new software-based networking products that the emphasis on specialized chips and networking hardware is doomed. Both cloud and the enterprise networks are becoming increasingly complicated; not just because of virtualization and scale, but also because of the increasing number of devices at the edge. Smartphones are pressuring networks, but adding sensors and other connected devices as integral business equipment, will require some serious thinking about networking hardware and cost.

“How quickly will a large healthcare org realize that the network is not the collection of routers and switches, but is instead these things connected to the network?” asked Bailey. “And how they interact fundamentally and how they are secured is responsible for the business. With that awareness they need SDN economics and OpenFlow will hasten that.” Hence InfoBlox’s decision to focus on software — software that is OpenFlow compatible.

This revolution won’t come immediately, but it will come.

Others, such as Jim Theodoras, director of technical marketing at ADVA, an optical provider to data centers, have expressed similar thoughts. Theodora has also expressed frustration that so far the message of router and hardware commoditization has been ignored. But for the most part, the existing products on the market and their associated marketing and product managers have been good at loudly shouting down the camp of people who see OpenFlow as a legitimate threat to the hardware makers. And it’s not just marketing. There are many obstacles to deploying an OpenFlow-based networking infrastructure.

(L to R) Lane Patterson, CTO, Equinix; Kenneth Duda, Founder, CTO and SVP, Software Engineering, Arista Networks
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

One obstacle, other than just getting the gear to work, is that the current chips sold by merchant silicon providers aren’t ready to support the most recent and faster versions of OpenFlow. NoviFlow, a startup in Montreal, that just announced an OpenFlow compatible switch that processes information at 100 gigabits per second per second — a significant amount of capacity when we’re talking about the data center market — went with specialty networking processors. It couldn’t build such a high capacity OpenFlow switch with existing chips, so it used network processors from EZChip. It’s still using a specialty chip to make its boxes, much like Cisco and Juniper do.

OpenFlow creates a common networking platform, not lock-in

NoviFlow’s 100 Gbps switch.

Marc LeClerc, NoviFlow’s VP of strategy and marketing is anticipating that day, explaining that NoviFlow has a high-end switch, but that it expects customers to also purchase lower-end gear that they will expect will work with the NoviFlow products. And when that day comes, the question is what kind of shakeout we’ll see in the networking world.

“When the world went over from mainframes to client-server it was a huge shift and plenty of companies that used to play in that market like Wang and DEC are no longer around anymore,” Bailey said.

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After two years of trying to figure out what OpenFlow was and how it might change networking for the better, 2012 was when the promise of OpenFlow morphed into software-defined networking, which was later co-opted into network virtualization. Things are still heating up, but let’s look at where we’ve been.

Guido Appenzeller (left) and Kyle Forster of Big Switch

This was the concept of SDN. Under that title, the physical hardware of a network was abstracted from the virtual machines and applications running on the network. Sometimes OpenFlow might have a hand in this and sometimes it won’t.

Instead of commodifying the router, these companies added a layer of software between the networking gear and the application, generally known as the controller. Some of these were open source, some provided APIs for the accessing the underlying networking gear and some did not. The point in SDN was that once you had this virtualization, it became possible to link your network to your application. Depending on whose controller you used, this process was easier or more difficult.

Dante Malagrino, Co-Founder and CEO, Embrane; Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners; Martin Casado, Co-Founder and CTO, Niciria
(c)2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

With that framework in mind, here are the notable deals in the networking world in 2012.

Oracle buys Xsigo: This deal, which was announced in July, wasn’t really an SDN deal. Xsigo has really tried to grab ahold of the SDN banner with its marketing, but it was about the virtualization at the hardware and port layer. Xsigo’s hardware (plus fabric) make it possible to plug storage and networking cables into a Xsigo box and then allocate those physical resources without a network engineer having to get involved. Oracle buying Xsigo fits with its proprietary hardware plans and less with any sort of Oracle SDN play.

Nicira’s CTO Martin Casado

Brocade buys Vyatta: Vyatta is another company that tried to give itself an SDN facelift. In this case, Brocade, the company better known for making switching hardware took the bait (or was simply merciful), and said it would buy Vyatta while the company was making the rounds trying to raise another round of venture capital. Brocade can use Vyatta’s networking software to move up the stack and possibly provide a more modular approach to SDN that allows customers to piece together Broacde’s hardware and software if they so choose (but they won’t have to choose both as they might in a Cisco or Arista decision).

Cisco to buy Cariden for $141 million: In November, Cisco purchased a network mapping and optimization company that has recently adopted some SDN features (and marketing). For Cisco, buying Cariden made sense because it delivered the type of controlled network virtualization ecosystem that posed no danger to Cisco’s router business, but allowed Cisco to sell SDN services and applications to its service provider customers. Meanwhile, Cisco this year also announced its own controller layer and an API to let applications talk to it (but not the underlying Cisco gear.)

Juniper to buy Contrail for $176 million: Finally, last week Juniper said it is buying Contrail, a startup in the SDN space that had only launched a day or two prior to the acquisition announcement. The deal came just a few months after Contrail had received $10 million in funding from Khosla Ventures, with Juniper participating as a strategic investor. Contrail’s technology centers around rethinking where the controller would sit in a virtualized network and how those pieces work together. It had a great team and good-sounding tech, but few real customers.

The year isn’t over and it’s possible one of the myriad networking startups funded this year, such as Big Switch, Pluribus Networks, Pica8, Plexxi and/or Cyan might end up getting bought before we close the books on 2012. But even if that doesn’t happen, I’m comfortable saying this is the clearly the year SDN has sold out and networking has really broken out.

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