VMware(s vmw) teamed up with Stanford and Berkeley on Tuesday to create an industry consortium around software defined networks, called the Open Networking Research Center. The company, famous for hypervisors that virtualize servers isn't about to watch while companies attempt to build the same disruption in networking. The consortium counts CableLabs, Cisco(s csco), Ericsson, Google(s goog), Hewlett-Packard(s hpq), Huawei, Intel(s intc), Juniper(s jnpr), NEC, NTT Docomo, Texas Instruments(s txn) and VMware as its founding sponsors.
I haven’t gotten excited about anything network related in a long time. Most of the changes in the last few years have been evolutionary. The idea of a programmable network is revolutionary. I think Cisco and Juniper have protection for market share on the high end but I see this as getting “good enough” sooner than latter and challenging the big guys on the low end.
I’m more excited about this from a cloud provider’s prospective. This will give providers the ability to create the same multitenant administration constructs for customer networks on commodity hardware similar to server virtualization.
