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I have noticed a lot of very premature dismissal of a growing trend in the networking industry, which is the rise of open network operating systems. Nearly every post-announcement discussion that I hear among peers tends to sound something like this:
I am not Facebook or Google. I don’t want to install third-party software on my switches, so this “open networking” movement is not relevant to me or my organization.
I believe this sentiment is based on an incomplete understanding of all of the benefits of open networking. I’d like to bring up some additional points that aren’t being discussed as much as others, as it pertains to open network operating systems. I believe these additional benefits apply to a very large spectrum of organizations, not just the top 1% webscale companies.
This is not to say that closed-source operating systems do not have a place anymore, or that the current participants in the open networking ecosystem are perfect, or that we have anything but a long road ahead of us in this journey…my point in writing this post is simply to illuminate parts of the conversation that deserve more attention.
We discussed open operating systems in a recent video-enabled Continue reading