HP Doubles Down on OpenDaylight

I am very excited to have HP increase its commitment in the OpenDaylight Project to the Platinum membership level. They are a major player in the networking space and will bring new perspectives the OpenDaylight developer community. HP is one of the few companies in the world that provides the full technology stack from infrastructure to apps, and is a significant end user of technology. They’re one of the few companies who have all the technology needed to architect and run a cloud at scale in-house and they do it all with open source. In fact their entire cloud strategy is based on OpenStack.

I remember working with key architects at Electronic Data Systems (now HP’s Services Enterprise unit) back in 2006 who were already pushing the envelope on virtualization. They were one of the first groups to really run a virtualized data center at scale. By investing in virtualization early they gained efficiencies and capabilities significantly earlier than some of their competitors. Today HP has a similar opportunity with the software-defined data center and cloud. Rather than try to build everything in a proprietary way, HP has seen the shift in how software is developed and has invested heavily in open source and open standards. You see this in their contributions to OpenFlow as well as OpenStack, providing critical infrastructure and key developers to those efforts. You may not realize that they are one of the leading contributors for the OpenStack Icehouse release.

As one of networking’s biggest players they’ve had a front row seat to the big debates happening around SDN--debates that are increasingly being internalized within the OpenDaylight Project. I know that HP will bring its perspectives into the discussions around the controller, northbound protocols, group policy definitions and much more. This will only make us stronger--diversity of opinion makes for stronger code. I am excited to see their leadership in proposing a project adding authentication capabilities to OpenDaylight (the AAA Service project)--I’m sure the first of many such contributions to come. Their technology and talent will help the community and platform grow.

Facilitating a fully automated software-defined infrastructure is a goal we as an industry share. We can get there faster by collaborating on the common building blocks. There is so much that HP can do to help us get there and I look forward to seeing their participation in OpenDaylight grow.