PALO ALTO, Calif., March 19 — Big Switch Networks, who is bringing the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks, today unveiled the three pillars around its Open SDN architecture as it celebrates its two-year anniversary.

"SDN has the promise to change the networking landscape, helping drive innovation and increasing business agility and operational efficiency of the network," said Joe Skorupa, VP Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. "However to reach its full potential, it must integrate with the existing ecosystem and standards."

"OpenFlow and SDN have been gaining significant momentum and, as customers adopt these technologies, it is critical they look for open standards, open APIs and open source to ensure the SDN solution they implement is future-proof," said Guido Appenzeller, Co-Founder and CEO of Big Switch Networks. "Big Switch Networks has been at the forefront of the OpenFlow standard creation, offered enterprise-grade open source SDN solutions to the community and continuously expanded its ecosystem of partners. Openness will be core to SDN success and, by relentlessly delivering it in our Open SDN architecture, we plan to stay ahead of the market."

Big Switch Networks' Open SDN architecture is based on these three pillars:

1. Open Standards: Support for networking industry standards, including newer ones like OpenFlow, ensure better integration and interoperability today and in the future between different players within the SDN ecosystem. It allows for smooth deployment of SDN solutions into existing physical and virtual networks and for multi-vendor environments without increasing complexity.

2. Open APIs: Open APIs foster the creation of a vibrant ecosystem of infrastructure, networks services and orchestration applications. Solutions delivered by this ecosystem can transform networks into a competitive business advantage by enabling dynamic coordination between networking, compute and storage resources and by providing a tighter alignment with business priorities.

3. Open Source: Successes such as Hadoop, MySQL and Linux demonstrate the importance of open source in every major software revolution that has taken place in the past decades. As networking becomes more software-oriented, open source provides complete transparency on the quality of its code while enabling customers to benefit from contributions made by the active open source SDN community and, more importantly, prevents vendor lock-in in the new network landscape.

Big Switch Networks supports open standards like OpenFlow and integrates with open APIs as an OpenStack member. Earlier this year, the company made the core component of its commercial solution available to the open source community with the release of Floodlight, its open source Controller, and it has since been downloaded more than a thousand times.

"For the last decade, most major changes in the software industry have been associated with open source: Hadoop with Big Data, Linux with Operating Systems and Netscape for the Web," said Matt Davy, Chief Network Architect and Executive Director of InCNTRE, Indiana University. "As networking is moving towards more programmability thanks to SDN, we should also expect strong open source communities to develop around solutions like the one Big Switch Networks introduced with Floodlight."

For more on Big Switch Networks' Open SDN architecture, view the SDN Coffee Talk with Guido Appenzeller as a guest speaker at: http://www.bigswitch.com/sdn-coffee-talks/.

Big Switch Networks Celebrates Two Years of Innovation

Big Switch Networks was founded in March 2010 to bring the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks. Key milestones include:

• March 2010: Big Switch Networks incorporation and product development began
• January 2011: Big Switch Networks' Controller went into alpha deployments at three research universities
• April 2011: Big Switch Networks joined the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) that was formed to promote OpenFlow and speed networking innovation
• May 2011: Big Switch Networks' Controller was shown in its first public demo in a network with OpenFlow-enabled switches from 12 different vendors at Interop's InteropNet OpenFlow Lab
• August 2011: Big Switch Networks' Controller went into private beta
• October 2011: Big Switch Networks announced that it joined the OpenStack Cloud Community
• January 2012: Big Switch Networks released Floodlight, an open source OpenFlow Controller

About Big Switch Networks

Big Switch Networks was founded in 2010 to deliver Open SDN solutions to cloud networks. Big Switch Networks raised $13.75 million Series A funding led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures in 2011 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit http://www.bigswitch.com.

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Source: Big Switch Networks