, the exciting new networking technology recently bursting out of academia and into industry, has generated considerable buzz since , which has been called "The Coming Out Party For OpenFlow." The protocol is simple but its implications on network architectures and the overall $16 billion switching market are far-reaching.

I'll review OpenFlow's origins and the variety of problems it is solving, cover its current common architecture, and then look forward to why OpenFlow is such a disruptive technology that will revolutionize how network functionality is delivered and how networks are designed and operated.

OpenFlow began at a consortium of universities, led by Stanford and Berkeley, as a way for researchers to use enterprise-grade Ethernet switches as customizable building blocks for academic networking experiments. They wanted their software to have direct programmatic access to a switch's forwarding tables, and so they created the OpenFlow protocol. The protocol itself is quite minimal -- a 27-page spec that is an extremely low-level, yet powerful, set of primitives for modifying, forwarding, queuing and dropping matched packets. OpenFlow is like an x86 instruction set for the network, upon which layers of software can be built.

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