OpenDaylight Summit Keynote Spotlight: Dan Pitt

Update: The recording for the "Forming and Norming for SDN/NFV" panel that Dan Pitt participated in at the OpenDaylight Summit February 4-5, 2014 can be found here. 

The promise of software-defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) to alleviate complexity and improve agility is achievable and has already been deployed in many cases, but there are still challenges to overcome for SDN and NFV to become ubiquitous. So how do we get there?

We asked Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. He is participating in a keynote panel at the OpenDaylight Summit Feb. 4-5, 2014 titled, "Forming and Norming SDN/NFV: Where to Support Innovation and Where to Simplify Life with Standards." 

Why is openness so important to the networking industry?
The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a strong champion for end users, and we focus our efforts on accelerating the adoption of open Software-Defined Networking (SDN). As the SDN movement progresses, we are doing everything we can to discourage and avoid a market driven by deliberate vendor lock-in, which often results in less innovation, higher prices, and an implied lack of choice. Openness is vital to the networking industry because it allows for greater creativity and it gives customers options. End users can be assured that the products they purchase are readily modified, improved, and interoperable with solutions from other vendors. They can select from the full variety of SDN products available to them, regardless of the solutions that they’ve purchased previously, with the assurance that these products will incorporate high-quality, interoperable technology. Moreover, as networking moves increasingly from a hardware-based discipline to a software-based one, open interfaces at key points will foster the explosive innovation of open source.

What's the biggest hurdle to achieving interoperability? How do we overcome it?
The biggest hurdle to achieving interoperability is the lack of standardization at the right places, which is why ONF devotes so much attention to the OpenFlow protocol as the open, standard southbound interface from an SDN controller. Industry agreement on this interface will encourage innovation below it and above it, offering customers a wide choice of switching platforms below it that they can choose from to meet their needs. Above it will be an even greater number of innovative choices for software control – easily written, iterated, and adapted for and by each network operator. (Modules in the OpenDaylight Project are examples of this.) We call this combination of switching, the OpenFlow protocol, and control software the “OpenFlow substrate.” There will also be a need for interoperable OpenFlow substrates, meaning their utility for software applications that reflect user business needs. Thus, the northbound interfaces (NBIs) will become increasingly important so that these applications can be portable. ONF is helping the industry get its arms around the chaotic variety of network abstractions (NBI latitudes) and application types (NBI longitudes) to arrive at some popular data models by which applications can make their needs known to the network, and the network can make its capabilities known to the applications.

How do you see the industry progressing in 2014?
2014 will be a watershed year for user experience with SDN. The latest market sizings (as by ACG Research) predict many billions of dollars in SDN expenditures by network operators in the immediate coming years, and AT&T lobbied a shot across the bow of the networking industry in 2013 with the announcement of its Domain 2.0 procurement strategy emphasizing the principles of SDN. So vendors are ramping up their product capabilities for OpenFlow and SDN, and investors are pouring small fortunes into SDN- and cloud-related startups. I think you will be hard-pressed at the end of 2014 to buy a commercial Ethernet switch or router that does not offer an OpenFlow client. Correspondingly, ONF is conducting interoperability PlugFests on at least two continents in 2014, focused on OpenFlow 1.3.

Dan Pitt has served as executive director of the Open Networking Foundation since its public launch in March, 2011. In this role he leads a team of several dozen employees and partners and nearly 2000 member volunteers focused on accelerating the adoption of open SDN. He spent 20 years in technical, managerial, and executive roles at IBM Raleigh and Zurich, HP Labs Palo Alto, Bay Networks, and Nortel Networks; served a five-year term as dean of the school of engineering at Santa Clara University; and advised and ran a number of startup companies in Silicon Valley, Australia, and Canada before coming to ONF. Dan received a B.S. in math from Duke University and a M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois.