Project Floodlight Grows To The World’s Largest SDN Ecosystem; Global Users, Contributors And Partners Innovating Using Open Source SDN

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Big Switch Networks today announced that Project Floodlight has grown to be the world’s largest open source SDN community, already encompassing over 200,000 lines of code, 15,000 downloads of the Floodlight controller, and contains contributions from more than 10 ecosystem institutions and vendors around the world. Demonstrating a continued commitment to open source, Big Switch today also introduced a refreshed community project called Project Floodlight, retiring the OpenFlow Hub name. The updated open source community website replaces OpenFlowHub.org and is available ProjectFloodlight.org. Big Switch Networks open source community initiatives date back to Stanford University and the Clean Slate Project, which was led by the company’s CEO and co-founder, Guido Appenzeller.

Today’s announcement of Big Switch’s renewed open source approach was accompanied by the announcement of Switch Light (see related announcement), an industry-first thin switching software platform, which is based on Indigo, an open source project within Project Floodlight. The Indigo Project produces open source software that is used by developers and vendor partners to implement the OpenFlow protocol on physical and hypervisor switches, and forms the core of Switch Light. Indigo has been qualified to operate as a virtual switch in a variety of server hypervisors and in merchant silicon-based physical switching platforms, including so called “white box” switches. Merchant silicon-based switches are an increasingly important component of Open Software-Defined Networking (SDN). They liberate customers from historically proprietary, closed networking architectures, accelerating the adoption of OpenFlow-based networking, and providing customers a broad array of open-source SDN switching options that radically reduce cost of operations for software-defined networking. To date, Big Switch has used Indigo to assist numerous vendor partners to enable OpenFlow in their switches.

“Big Switch is a very strong believer and supporter of a community-powered approach to innovation,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks. “The promise and the reality of SDN must be based on a truly open architecture. Our ongoing and expanding commitment to the open source SDN community will foster growth and innovation in SDN, as evidenced by the large and enthusiastic community formed and growing around Floodlight.”

A growing list of innovative users and ecosystem vendor partners around the world are building applications and deployments on open source SDN projects including the Floodlight controller and the Indigo OpenFlow agent.

6WIND
“Thanks to the large and growing community around Floodlight as well as its support by Big Switch Networks, we have selected it as the baseline controller for demonstrating our own upcoming OpenFlow-based solutions,” said Eric Carmès, CEO of 6WIND. “Customers typically use our 6WINDGate™ networking software in conjunction with standards-based open-source platforms and will benefit from the synergy between Big Switch’s products and ours.”

Canonical
"Ubuntu is the most popular platform for OpenStack because of its ability to integrate cutting edge technologies,” said Kyle MacDonald, Canonical VP of Cloud. “Our enterprise and carrier customers are already demanding advanced networking solutions based on open standards, so we are supportive of Big Switch's commitment to Open SDN and Project Floodlight, as they provide our customers the flexibility needed to build dynamic cloud infrastructure while simplifying network operations."

Caltech/CERN
“We chose Floodlight because it is represented by the largest open source community, and has a modular architecture that makes it straightforward to customize,” Artur Barczyk, senior engineer at CalTech. “At the same time, having Big Switch Networks behind Floodlight gives us confidence in the future of the open source project, support and a partner to address issues and work with on a technical level.”

FireMon
"FireMon is a strong supporter of open source and open standards in software-defined networks. We have been working with Floodlight to demonstrate how security and risk analysis can be tightly integrated into an open SDN,” said F. Ward Holloway III, vice president of business development.

Overture
“Project Floodlight and the Indigo2 OpenFlow framework helped Overture accelerate our development by offering robust, industry leading open source software,” said Overture head of advanced development, Bob Lynch. “We applaud the efforts of Big Switch and the community supporting Floodlight and Indigo2 as they promote what has become the SDN industry’s reference."

Radware
Radware’s SDN solutions allow software-defined networks to easily provision and automate scalable L4-L7 applications such as ADC and security solutions as wide network services. We are part of and strongly support the open source communities, including Project Floodlight, that allow customers to fully utilize innovative network and application technologies,” said Avi Chesla, Radware CTO. “We chose the Floodlight open source controller to work with our ADC and Security SDN application to transform the network from a simple forwarding and routing entity into a smart, application aware, routing layer. Open standard initiatives are extremely important to provide customers democratization in choosing the most relevant applications for their business needs.”

SRI International, a research and innovation center, is developing security enhancements to the Floodlight controller for use in sensitive computing environments.
“When selecting an Open Flow Controller to target for our security extension, SRI researchers needed one that was well-engineered and broadly available. Working with Big Switch, we are now building the tools that will allow network operators to create more secure Open Flow networks,” said Phil Porras, program director in the Computer Science Laboratory at SRI International.

About Big Switch Networks
Big Switch Networks is the leader in Open Software-Defined Networking. The company’s Open SDN platform embraces industry standards, open APIs, open source, and vendor-neutral support for both physical and virtual networking infrastructure. Big Switch Networks Open SDN Suite supports a broad range of networking applications, including network virtualization for public and private cloud data centers built OpenStack, CloudStack and other platforms. Big Switch Networks is privately held and has raised over $45M from Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and others. For additional information follow us @bigswitch or visit: bigswitch.com

Big Switch Networks, Big Network Controller, Big Tap, Big Virtual Switch, Switch Light, Floodlight and Open SDN are trademarks or registered trademarks of Big Switch Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered marks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners.

Contacts

Big Switch Networks
Ellen Roeckl, 408-857-9718
[email protected]