The networking world remains one of the last bastions of the mainframe computing design point… The networking equipment world looks just like mainframe computing ecosystem did 40 years ago. A small number of players produce vertically integrated solutions where the ASICs (the central processing unit responsible for high speed data packet switching), the hardware design, the hardware manufacture, and the entire software stack are stack are single sourced and vertically integrated.
Open, multi-layer hardware and software stacks encourage innovation and rapidly drive down costs. The server world is clear evidence of what is possible when such an ecosystem emerges. In the networking world, we have a long way to go but small steps are being made.
This standardized layer hasn’t existed in the networking ecosystem as it has in the commodity server world. As a consequence, we don’t have high quality networking stacks able to run across a wide variety of networking devices. A potential solution is near: OpenFlow. This work originating out of the Stanford networking team driven by Nick McKeown. It is a low level hardware independent interface for updating network routing tables in a hardware independent-way. It is sufficiently rich to support current routing protocols and it also can support research protocols optimized at high-scale data center networking systems such as VL2 and PortLand.
The ingredients of an open stack are coming together.