NEC and IBM are together transforming the networks of old, as they announce today the industry’s first high performance OpenFlow ecosystem, complete with customer references.  These include early innovators Selerity, furnishing real-time data for global financial markets, Tervela, who provide a high-speed messaging fabric, and Stanford University, the birthplace of OpenFlow.  These organizations join over two dozen other institutions and enterprises who have  deployed ProgrammableFlow, choosing the integrated NEC/IBM OpenFlow solution, which aligns with the OpenFlow standard and fulfills the promise of open networks.

We are excited to be co-marketing with IBM the first high-performance OpenFlow network solution, including our ProgrammableFlow controller, our PF5420 1GbE ProgrammableFlow switch, the new PF5820 10GbE switch, and IBM’s OpenFlow-enabled G8264 top-of-rack 10GbE switch.  This ecosystem, bought into by the companies mentioned above, begins to reveal the true promise of OpenFlow.

In related news, Jon Oltsik blogged in NetworkWorld earlier this month about a circumstance he calls “Network Discontinuity”.  This is a condition he equates to the demise of dinosaurs, which he says ESG research has uncovered in many large enterprise data center networks today.  Jon outlines all of the factors including cloud and virtualization that are changing the data center, but the network has been slow (like the dinosaur) in adapting to all of the changes.  As a result, he says “the data center networking dinosaur is adapting but we are rapidly approaching a breaking point.”  Jon graciously gave us permission to use the following chart, which outlines ESG’s recent findings on problems with data center networks today.     Do you see your issues reflected here?

We are observing gathering interest around SDN and the OpenFlow standard.  Big Switch Networks made an announcement recently, providing their controller, Floodlight, to open source.  Of course, NEC’s own Helios controller was added to the open source OpenFlow controller list back in November of 2010.  With Helios, now known as Trema, we provided an open source modular framework for developing OpenFlow controllers in Ruby/C.

NEC is at Joint Techs, this week, a conference for Network Engineers put on by Internet2in Baton Rouge.  We presented an update on SDN at NEC and January 25-tomorrow-at 8:50 CST will participate in  a panel discussion on Software Defined Networking: Industry Involvement, led by Matt Davy of Indiana University.

Finally, we’d like to give a shout-out to one of our favorite Network bloggers, Ivan Pepelnjak, who just put up a new sitewe think you may want to visit.  Ivan has been following OpenFlow and SDN closely, and is offering a three hour overview of SDNon February 7.  We plan to attend, and you may want to check it out, as well.