Neela Jacques's blog

As we move into April we approach the two-year birthday of OpenDaylight. It has been amazing to see how developers and users around the globe have really embraced our vision of creating one common, open platform for SDN and NFV that can be leveraged by all. What we’ve been able to achieve through open collaboration in such a short amount of time is incredible. NFV is becoming real.

The rapid innovation that we saw with OpenDaylight’s open SDN platform in the past year has changed the networking industry forever. An industry that had been fairly stagnant and slow to change is now embracing open source as the de facto way to achieve innovation and interoperability for SDN and is turning to open source again to achieve the same level of innovation for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV).

Everywhere you turn these days you hear the term “open” in networking. The idea of openness in networking has come a long way in the past year and it’s now considered the de facto standard way that we’ll achieve interoperability and innovation.

This week at the Network Virtualization and SDN World event in London I’ve had many people ask me some variation of, ‘how is OpenDaylight doing?’ or ‘how are things progressing?’. To answer those questions, I must implicitly answer a different one: how do you judge the success of an open source project like OpenDaylight?

Having just attended OpenStack Summit and LinuxCon/CloudOpen Japan it’s clear that interest in open source is the highest it's ever been and has hit the mainstream. These are open source events to be sure, but what struck me were the conversations I had with folks about how and why open cloud and open SDN have continued to mature.

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.

Since the beginning of the internet there hasn’t been something so profoundly different in networking as what’s happening right now with SDN. In the past decade the transformation toward virtualization has been occurring in the rest of the computing infrastructure, but applying these same principles to networking is proving much more challenging. Networking remains today a hardware-centric fabric that must be manually configured and reconfigured.

One of my friends recently posted this on Facebook and it got me thinking.