Shortly thereafter, (IaaS) operators began investigations into OpenFlow architectures as they saw the same full cross-sectional bandwidth requirements from tenants with a large number of VMs that were widely dispersed across many racks and rows throughout their data centers. These providers were equally driven by the need for strong multi-tenancy support, a requirement that outpaces the capabilities of traditional scripts and VLANs due to scale and speed restrictions. This spawned a new class of OpenFlow and research into network .

Today, it is this multi-tenant networking use of OpenFlow that is leading the way as OpenFlow moves from the domain of the hyper-scale data centers to IaaS providers and the enterprise data center.

Most current OpenFlow solutions incorporate a three-layer architecture, where the first layer is comprised of the all-important OpenFlow-enabled . Typically, these are physical Ethernet switches that have the OpenFlow feature enabled. We've also seen OpenFlow-enabled hypervisor/software switches and OpenFlow-enabled . More devices are certainly coming.

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