The first Open Networking Summit, the premiere gathering focusing on the future of OpenFlow and Software-Defined Networking (SDN), ended with audience applause as the conference completed three days of conversation, thought-leadership and demonstrations. More than 400 people gathered at the event to hear speakers from across the country share their reasons for a change in networking and how SDN would help accomplish this change. The conference kicked off with a day of two parallel tutorials: one for engineers and other for managers. Each attracted 100 participants and received enthusiastic reviews.
Speakers from the Open Networking Foundation, Facebook, Verizon, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Internet2, Nicira, Big Switch Networks, Cisco, HP, Juniper, NEC, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Stanford, Georgia Tech, and Indiana University participated in two days of presentations, panels highlighting the value and potential of SDN. A theme emerged to suggest SDN represents a new networking paradigm that would enable more innovation; provide more control of the networks by their owners and operators; and make networks more programmable plug-and-play components of the larger cloud computing infrastructure and services. The net result for network operators would be significantly reduced capex and opex, increased revenues and the ability to scale their infrastructures. A selected group of 20 demonstrations from global teams showed real-world examples of products and services implemented with SDN technologies.
"We set out to build an event that was a first of its kind in the SDN space," said Guru Parulkar, executive producer of the Open Networking Summit and executive director of Stanford's Clean Slate Program. "The response was overwhelmingly positive and confirmed that network operators face difficult challenges with scaling and managing their network infrastructures and they look at software-defined networking as the way forward."
Day one of the conference hosted tutorials on OpenFlow and SDN from a variety of viewpoints and skill levels. Focusing on platforms and programming tools, these in-depth sessions represented the first educational sessions available to the general engineering and manager communities.
The rest of the Summit highlighted thought leaders from both industry and academic communities, presentations on the power and future impact of SDN, and panels highlighting SDNs in enterprise, datacenter, and service provider networks. In each case, the business advantages took precedence over the technical details, suggesting a strong market pull rather than technology push.
"At the Open Networking Foundation we are seeing a lot of energy behind SDN and making this an industry norm in record time," said Dan Pitt, Executive Director of the Open Networking Foundation. "The Summit exposed SDN to a bigger and broader audience bringing solutions providers, industry experts, key leaders in academia, and customers that have real on-the-ground challenges together into a single, dynamic conversation about how to move forward and tackle growing, global networking problems."
The Open Networking Summit announced that it would be holding a second conference in April of 2012 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The goal is to hold a larger event while retaining the collective and collaborative feel of a growing technology movement. To pre-register for the 2012 Summit visit http://opennetsummit.org/registration.html. Videos and presentations from the recent conference can be seen at http://opennetsummit.org/past_conferences.html
About Stanford Clean Slate Internet Design Program: Launched in March 2007, the Clean Slate Design for the Internet is an industrial affiliate program in the Stanford School of Engineering characterized by two questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?" and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?" OpenFlow/SDN is one of the technologies resulting from the program. Nick McKeown, Stanford professor of electrical engineering and computer science is the faculty director of the program. The Clean Slate Program has been funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) and by an industry affiliates program that includes Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Google, NEC, NTT DOCOMO, Xilinx.