Origins and Evolution of OpenFlow/SDN

Posted: October 27, 2011 | Author: networkheresy | Filed under: OpenFlow, SDN |1 Comment

For those of you who are interested, my keynote at last week’s Open Networking Summit provides some background on OpenFlow and SDN in the form of a historical narrative.  However, the main point of the talk (which doesn’t come across as well as I would have liked) is that it really is the community, and not necessarily the technology, that makes the SDN movement so special.  I believe the technology will work itself out.  However, building a diverse community with strong representation across the networking ecosystem (from ODMs, to customers, and everyone in between) is a very difficult undertaking.  And now that we have such a community let’s be sure to acknowledge its importance and focus on continuing to cultivate and grow it.

And for some only tangentially related trivia, I’ve been tracking down the origins of the term ‘SDN’.  From what I’ve been able to dig up, it was coined by Kate Greene (who had covered software defined radio) while putting together this article.  So, thanks Kate.