Great question. I think that there is a fair amount of difference in terms of instruction set and flexibility, but there certainly is an increasing amount of similarity. One thing I think the switching world would benefit from is an increasing amount of programmability. Having more flexibility in being able to do different things with different bits in your packets would be useful. There are some startups looking in this direction.

I understand another key benefit of SDN/OpenFlow is being able to play with a lot of "what if" scenarios to enable you to fine-tune the network before going live.

Exactly. So one of the key benefits we have is a very nice emulation and simulation environment where the exact same control software that would be running on servers might be controlling a combination of real and emulated switching devices. And then we can inject a number of failure scenarios under controlled circumstances to really accelerate our test work.

Are you actually pumping in fake traffic?

Yes, there's some amount of fake traffic. Obviously, we're not necessarily able to reproduce the complete scale. The nice thing is, if you think in terms of the total amount of traffic we might have in a , it's going to be substantially larger than total WAN traffic, so while our WAN traffic is substantial, LAN traffic is substantially more.