Brocade Furthers SDN Plans with OpenFlow 1.3 Support

Brocade (BRCD) continues to build on its software-defined networking (SDN) strategy with the expectation that more businesses will adopt the technology this year. The latest news out of the company has to do with supporting OpenFlow 1.3.

OpenFlow is a critical and central element to Brocade’s SDN go-to-market strategy. Brocade is now supporting OpenFlow 1.3 across its entire IP portfolio of routing and switching products, which the vendor noted is an extension of its approach to SDN. That means Brocade is supporting version 1.3 from the data center to the campus to the wide area network (WAN).

According to Brocade, earlier versions of OpenFlow are widely deployed among early adopters, but it chose to initiate support for version 1.3 because of its richer feature set that is required for commercial and enterprise networks to address complex network behavior and optimize performance for dynamic SDN applications.

Brocade noted a few of the most important features in OpenFlow 1.3, including quality of service (QoS), Q-in-Q, group tables, active-standby controller and IPv6.

“Brocade’s commitment to SDN is clear in the significant contributions to the technical leadership of the Open Networking Foundation and OpenFlow,” said Curt Beckmann, chair of Forward Abstraction Working Group (FAWG) at Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and principal architect at Brocade, in a prepared statement. “The real payoff of Brocade’s standards work comes as we provide deployable and compelling SDN solutions. Our latest example is the Flow-Aware Real-Time SDN Analytics OpenFlow application, for which Brocade has been named a finalist as part of the Open Networking Summit’s SDN Idol competition.”

Although SDN is starting out in data center applications, Brocade expects customers will demand more campus and WAN applications. According to Jason Nolet, vice president of Data Center Networking at Brocade, customers are already realizing the need for SDN in the campus and WAN.

Brocade is demonstrating its SDN capabilities at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) this week.