ONF shares highlights of the sold-out Open Networking Summit, the premier event for Software-Defined Networking and the OpenFlow® protocol.
Three years ago the Open Networking Summit attracted approximately 400 attendees at its inaugural event at Stanford University. Now, the two-day sold-out conference saw remarkable growth in attendance to approximately 3,200 in person and online attendees.
We had the opportunity to meet and hear the inventors, innovators, and leaders from different parts of the worldwide Software-Defined Networking (SDN) ecosystem talk about implementations and deployments of SDN and the OpenFlow protocol. There were also some exciting additions to the conference including the ONS PlugFest and SDN Idols@ONS, a competition where many of our member companies had the opportunity to showcase their new SDN products. What’s more, the expo hall brought more than 40 company exhibitors and demonstrations, along with 11 academic demonstrations and 12 academic posters showing advances in development and application.
ONS also brought some informative keynote and plenary sessions from industry pundits who all expressed the importance of SDN for today’s networks. While there were a lot of great highlights from this year’s event, we wanted to share a few of our observations from this year’s conference.
- Vinton Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist for Google who is also known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” highlighted in his presentation how SDN may have improved the original design of the Internet. His presentation validated the opportunities that SDN and the OpenFlow® protocol can provide to the network. A high point from his talk on the separation of control plane and data plane was his assertion that, “Boy, I wish we had done that with the Internet.”
- ONF member company Centec Networks won the SDN Idol@ONS award for its OpenFlow® V350 open SDN platform. The V350 is built on Centec’s latest switching silicon featuring N-Flow architecture, and offered public confirmation of the emergence of the white box switch market.
- In the presentations and demonstrations, it was clear that all the major incumbents that attended ONS are now supporting the OpenFlow® protocol.
- Keisuke Nagase, professor and deputy director of the University Hospital at Kanazawa University, shared an impressive case study in his breakout session as an NEC customer with the hospital’s OpenFlow® protocol deployments to campus LAN. Kanazawa has adopted OpenFlow-based SDN for everything from critical patient care to medical records. A highpoint was the call to see this breakthrough as an evolution in philosophy, not technology.
- During the Summit, there was a lot of interest and discussion around the impact of SDN on carriers, service providers, and the telecommunications industry. At ONF, we are excited to continue our close work with the ETSI network-operator-led Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) Industry Specification Group (ISG).
- One of the strongest themes from many of the speakers was the alignment of the network with business priorities.
This year’s ONS was effective in highlighting the successful deployments of SDN and the OpenFlow® protocol. There was a lot to learn at the event, and many more opportunities to come in the following year as SDN and ONS continue to grow. If you were not able to attend, but want to view the presentations and video highlights, visit the ONS website. I look forward to the exciting discussions and innovations featured this year unfold over the coming year.
- Dan Pitt, Executive Director
