Written by Doug | Jan 11, 2012 5:00:00 AM
PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwire - January 11, 2012) - Big Switch Networks, an OpenFlow company bringing the benefits of virtualization and cloud architecture to enterprise networks, today released Floodlight, an Apache-licensed open source OpenFlow Controller, as part of its commitment to the open source community around Software-Defined Networking (SDN). "The first instance of OpenFlow open source code was developed by the Stanford Research Lab -- where several members of our company including myself worked -- in collaboration with other universities nationwide to demonstrate its feasibility," said Guido Appenzeller, Co-Founder and CEO of Big Switch Networks. "Now that SDN is becoming a commercial reality, it was natural for us to give back to the research community and develop a best-in-class open source platform for all. This will encourage a rich ecosystem and stimulate innovation using enterprise-grade tools." OpenFlow Controllers are central components of SDN as they capture control information from OpenFlow-enabled switches to centrally manage networks. Floodlight serves the needs of academics, offers a powerful platform to commercial developers to build SDN network services and helps network administrators experience OpenFlow first hand. Big Switch Networks is committed to maintaining and enhancing Floodlight, which will be a component of its commercial controller and the foundation for additional features and network applications. Floodlight is offered under the Apache 2.0 license, the preferred license of enterprises according to a recent survey by OpenLogic and the license used by other fast-growing projects such as Hadoop and OpenStack. Floodlight, which originated from the Beacon controller created by Big Switch Networks advisor and Stanford PhD candidate David Erickson, was designed and built in Java to offer an easily extensible, developer friendly platform for SDN. The source code is available on the OpenFlow Hub website at: http://floodlight.openflowhub.org. Read Big Switch Networks Product Manager Mike Cohen's Announcing Floodlight: An Apache-licensed OpenFlow Controller blog: http://www.bigswitch.com/wp/floodlight-openflow-controller.
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