First, I have to admit that I am quite excited about the OpenDayLight project as it promises to bring the “next penguin” despite all the arguments and roadblocks.

Certainly one may question the reason for all the hardware guys joining OpenDayLight, isn’t the ultimate goal to make network hardware to be based on “white-label” box that can be overlaid with open source (Linux based) OS that would provide all the great functionality that today enclosed in proprietary hardware of the “giants”?

Of course it is! Can it be stopped? Well… they’ll try, I am sure. Typically in and standard initiatives there are organizations that join to push, and others that join to corrupt. One may certainly argue that BigSwitch was there to push, but once realized that OpenDayLight promises with “giants” on board may be a looong ways out decided to pull out. That’s certainly a valid point, and perhaps that’s the reason why it took a while for OpenStack to accept VMWare, but what’s done is done. It is hard to neglect that Cisco does like hardware! But at the same time they do realize that soon (referring to the typical cycle of maturity of technology) things WILL change.

“I’ve been in this business a very long time, and in IT, most of the new stuff that’s announced like this is probably in the future, but it’s a lot further in the future than most pundits and most technologists would say,” said Everett Dyer, senior vice president and general manager at Presidio, an Orlando, Fla.-based Cisco partner. “In my business, we are all about the practical application of technology for supporting business requirements. So [SDN] is an important thing to keep in mind, but I don’t think it’s going to have a major impact on the IT space to support businesses for a very long time.“

The way I would interpret it as that we are going to “milk it” as long as we can. That’s the theme for many organizations today. Some will likely to die and look at their core products to slowly ramp down, and other organization is there to innovate and springboard on still stable base and embrace the transformation. It is not easy! Company DNA is hard to change, BUT the main question is which path do you choose? I hope that Everett Dyer while making above mentioned statement has his R&D guys looking for new opportunities, otherwise… they’ll join the rest that will get eaten by software while standing on the sidewalk watching “new guys” taking over. It is out! It is just too attractive to CopEx and OpEx that all it will take is a maturity that will happened in the next 3 years (not longer). BTW network is not the only place. Look at Ceph, OpenStack, Hadoop, every possible technology that becomes important to the business that giants are trying to catch up will soon be taken over, and arguably “giants” in 5 years will have different names that the “street” will talk about.

Anyway… back to the news in hand. BigSwitch has left because of the decision based on “D-E proposal” (after David Erickson of Stanford and Colin Dixon of IBM) that won the case and BigSwitch’s FloodLight controller will not be used as the core of the OpenDayLight initiative. Instead it will be Cisco One combined with BigSwitch’s net-virt wrapper around the Service Abstraction Layer (SAL) and OSGi framework. That certainly did not make BigSwitch happy:

“In the end, the leadership of ODL claimed ‘consensus’ was reached to start the project with the Cisco controller as the base repository, despite broad community advocacy to start from a neutral repository – not an incumbent vendor’s. Thinking about this long and hard, it became clear to us that this isn’t a foundation that we can build on,”

And was against the community, which is certainly not a great start:

• “A third (new) repo to house the merged controller effort, COUPLED with a commensurate initial committer list comprised of individuals spearheading said effort makes complete sense,” HP director of cloud networking and SDN Sarwar Raza, writes.
• “A clear repo and a balanced slate of committers may take us as fast as we can thru the finish line… the appearance has value too! our success and communication with new developers and potential customers is much easier when the appearance of no politics, meritocracy, multi-lateral code contribution is there,” Uri Elzur of Intel says.
• “It is important to do this right than rush into something that will not be right: architecture-wise and will not have larger community buy-in. I think the idea of starting a new project with a more inclusive competent group of committers with the goal of creating a unified code base is the right approach,” Guru Parulkar of premier SDN research lab ONRC says.

But what’s done is done, and below is the currently the proposed architecture:

What’s important to the consumers and innovators in the application space is Northbound API, and it looks like the promise is to deliver such, which will be a great considering that unlike OpenFlow (southbound and more low level) Northbound was left uncertain. Perhaps OpenDayLight bring some clarity to that as well.

When it comes to the argument on whose controller to use and Cisco won because they have a bigger stake in this, that still arguable to me. I am not sure whether Cisco’s controller in OpenDayLight changes anything when it comes to the customers buys Cisco’s hardware, etc. It is still open, it still has a goal to run on “white-lable” hardware switch and whether that’s Cisco’s controller inside does not change much IF the community is working, watching, and active.

Looking forward to the first 60 days update in David Meyer’s blog who BTW should appear in All Things Open this fall in Raleigh, NC. More updates on that soon!