Over the past couple of years, software defined networking (SDN) has emerged as a strong alternative for IT operations in the areas of WAN, data center and overlay solutions. The primary benefit ...

What is OpenFlow? OpenFlow is a programmable network protocol designed to manage and direct traffic among routers and switches from various vendors. It separates the programming of routers and ...

OpenFlow 2.0 doesn't formally exist yet, but one possible shape of the protocol — a more flexible take on packet switching — is starting to form. A research paper outlines the idea and sums it up ...

During its SDN conference call this week with Morgan Stanley and other participants, Cisco officials talked often about how a “feedback loop” is vital in its vision of a programmable network. This ...

Brocade this week announced broad support for OpenFlow 1.3 across its IP product line to extend SDNs beyond research and academia and into commercial and enterprise networks. Brocade’s new 2x100G ...

The promise of bringing software-defined networking (SDN) to optical networks was a big topic at OFC this week, but you didn't have to dive down far to see how difficult that task is going to be.

The OpenFlow switching and communications protocol addresses packet routing on a software layer that's separate from a network's physical infrastructure. OpenFlow's major benefit is flexibility, ...

Can you program a network of multivendor switches and routers, all running different operating systems, command line interfaces and configuration routines, to work in concert when it comes to managing ...

Big Switch Networks just launched a tool to allow OpenStack developers to more easily use open software defined networking tools to deployment of agile networking. The company's Floodlight, an open ...

APIs and messaging protocols, including some that are standards, can let users build software-defined networks today. The key issue, though, is that not everyone implements the same ones or implements ...

OpenFlow 1.3 introduced the concept of multi-tables and methods to access and populate other tables including VLAN, MAC, IP, and MPLS. This brought in the ability to push flows to the appropriate ...