by: Shehzad Merchant, Chief Strategy Officer at Gigamon
The promise of OpenFlow is open, standardized networking. However, recent trends suggest that OpenFlow deployments are straying away from that promise and moving towards end-to-end lock-in, much like the days of fiber channel.
Today, if you take an OpenFlow-enabled switch from one vendor, an OpenFlow controller from another vendor and run an application on top of that, the experience you get will vary significantly from one ecosystem of controller and switch to another. Lack of standardized northbound APIs and lack of consistency in OpenFlow switch implementations are some of the factors causing an “end-to-end lock-in.”
In a post on SDNCentral, I explore some of the reasons why I think that the OpenFlow community is beginning to stray from its promise of open, interoperable and standardized networking, and suggests some key changes that could redirect and positively impact the direction of the OpenFlow initiative.
For the full blog post visit: SDN Central
Gigamon 