New Networking World Order

I have a collegue that is leaving Oracle today to go to a hybrid hardware/software network startup. That, in itself, is not a surprise as people switch companies frequently (especially in the valley.) What is surprising is the emergence of these HW/SW networking players.

I think that this is the real effect of SDN first showing itself.

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I also saw this announcement today:

Cumulus launches a Linux distro for data-center bare metal

This is interesting because it seems to be an outgrowth of what Intel and to a lesser extent Broadcom and a few other companies started with their “open” network switch platform initiatives a while ago.

These network platforms are able to run customized commodity OS’s (or enable systems vendors to build more open platforms) instead of the more “traditional” JunOS, IOS etc. that Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, etc. use today.

Because their based on commodity OS, they can facilitate application and platform integration much easier than the isolated networking stacks of the past. This is the same thing that Cisco is trying to do in-house with NXOS (Nexus 1000v etc.)

Imagine an open-source/open-standards based version of this based on open hardware platforms, open software (like Linux,) and Open vSwitch. That is what’s coming from guys like these.

This is going to start to make OpenStack Quantum even more interesting…