OpenDaylight SDN opens the curtains on its initial release

After several months of effort, OpenDaylight is ready for sunrise. “The OpenDaylight community is developing an SDN architecture that supports a wide range of protocols and can rapidly evolve in the direction SDN goes, not based on any one vendor’s purposes,” said David Meyer, the OpenDaylight Project's Technical Steering Committee chair, in a statement.

Meyer continued, “As an open-source project OpenDaylight can be a core component within any SDN architecture, putting the user in control. The community is working to further refine the Service Abstraction Layer to deliver an efficient application API that can be used over a broad collection of network devices so we can deliver a best-of-breed platform that will help users of all stripes realize the promise of SDN.”

Specifically, OpenDaylight Hydrogen will include new and legacy protocols such as Open vSwitch Database Management Protocol (OVSDB), OpenFlow 1.3.0, Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)  and Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP).

Besides embracing what's come before, Hydrogen will also include multiple methods for network virtualization and two initial applications that leverage the features of OpenDaylight: Affinity Metadata Service to aid in policy management and Defense4All for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection.

To make OpenDaylight more cloud friendly, it will include an OpenStack Neutron, OpenStack's virtual networking, plugin and the Open vSwitch Database project will allow management from within OpenStack.

It's impressive enough to get all these technologies together. Even better, the Linux Foundation, which oversees OpenDaylight, has kept the SDN powers working with each other. In Hydrogen, Cisco, ConteXtream, Ericsson, IBM, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), NEC, Pantheon, Plexxi, and Radware all worked together.

As Inder Gopal, OpenDaylight's Board of Directors chairman and IBM VP for networking development, said in a statement, “OpenDaylight has made great strides toward its goal of accelerating a common SDN platform. As the networking industry evolves to a software-defined world we are seeing open source development and design methodology as the driving force for modern architectures.”

Want to see what it will look like? The project will show off Hydrogen at OpenDaylight Mini-Summits at the CloudOpen conferences on September 18, 2013 in New Orleans and on October 22, 2013 in Edinburgh Scotland.

If you're a programmer and you want to work on OpenDaylight SDN take, the project is more than happy to welcome you.

OpenDaylight Project Releases New Architecture Details for Its Software-Defined Networking Platform