Big Switch Networks Talks About the Future of Network Virtualization at the Open Networking Summit

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire - Oct 26, 2011) - Last week at the Open Networking Summit, Big Switch Networks, an OpenFlow company bringing the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks, talked about how Software Defined Networking (SDN) -- a concept introduced as early as 2007 to provide network owners and operators with more predictable, open and agile networks -- will shape the future of networking.

Big Switch Networks Co-Founder and CEO Guido Appenzeller gave a talk on the impact of network virtualization for enterprises. Before co-founding Big Switch Networks, he was an Assistant Consulting Professor at Stanford University and head of the Clean Slate Lab where he led the development team that built OpenFlow v1.0, the most widely adopted version of the standard, and the reference for current controller implementations.

Appenzeller talked about how SDN will allow for greater and easier integration between enterprise applications and the network and how OpenFlow is the key enabler of SDN as the currently standardized protocol enabling network virtualization. He also talked about how virtualizing the network enables virtual topologies to be built, torn down and adjusted on an as needed basis along with the associated network views. Operators can have a global view of the network architecture, while a tenant can access an abstracted view of the network that they have been assigned and administer it as a single entity even if it spans multiple locations shielding them from seeing other elements not part of their network, providing assurance, simplicity and security for multi-tenant environments.

Big Switch Networks Co-Founder Kyle Forster led a full day tutorial to help managers understand the use cases for SDN / OpenFlow and how new network virtualization technologies can help solve today's networking challenges. Speakers Peter Krey, Founder and President of Krey Associates, Matthew Davy, Director of InCNTRE and Chief Network Architect at Indiana University, Paul Lappas, Co-Founder and VP of Engineering at GoGrid, and Christopher Liljenstolpe, Solutions Architect at Big Switch Networks, shared what triggered them to consider SDN / OpenFlow and how early deployments are going.

Read Big Switch Networks VP of Outbound Marketing Isabelle Guis' blog We Are Onto Something Big:
http://www.bigswitch.com/wp/we-are-onto-something-big.../

About the Open Networking Summit
The Open Networking Summit was the first public industry event exclusively focused on the new paradigm known as SDN. Most industry participants were members of the Open Networking Foundation, a non-profit industry consortium whose mission is to standardize OpenFlow and advance SDN.

About Big Switch Networks
Big Switch Networks was founded in 2010 to bring the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks using OpenFlow. Big Switch Networks is headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit: http://www.bigswitch.com.