Dave Larson, VP and CTO for HP Networking, discussed software-defined networking beyond the buzz with theCube co-hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick, live at the HP Discover 2013 event this week.

“Software-defined networking is offering a new opportunity to rethink the way we build our networks,” Larson said, “how to extract business value from it.”  Commenting on the VMware acquisition of Nicira, he explained that “network virtualization is critical to allowing hyperscale cloud environments to meet the automation that they need” to deliver to customers, but that’s not SDN.

“The market is changing, this is evolutionary, we’re the advent of this paradigm shift that is SDN,” Larson said. But SDN is not going to be limited to network technology in the future, it’s more about enabling apps to require policies that allow them to network properly.

A dynamic evolution

Cloud and service providers are running networks and they need to integrate with the enterprise. Furrier asked how traffic would be routed when enterprise and external traffic coexisted.

“You need a policy control mechanism to allow you to take advantage of the elasticity of cloud,” Larson answered. Furrier pointed out that people don’t want static policies, they are looking for dynamic ones.

“One of the problems that we have in enabling and enforcing policies over a network environment is that many applications are encrypted,” Larson said. “We use APIs from our controller to integrate with Microsoft Lynk” to offer real time dynamic policies as a solution.

• Policy has to be controlled in real time

Big Data will also require dynamic policies, he added. From a Big Data standpoint, policy has to be controlled in real time.

“You need one fabric that is connecting your storage, your server and your applications, and it’s not all physical, it’s also virtual,” Larson said. That is HP fabric. “SDN is a tool and an emerging paradigm to break the location of the control point.”

Asked about their differentiators compared to Cisco,  Larson said: “We compete with Cisco on open standards. We are a huge advocate of using OpenFlow on switches.” Asked to explain OpenFlow in relation to SDN, Larson said: “OpenFlow is the only available standard protocol with which you can enable SDN on switch. But we also do SDN with OpenStack, not just OpenFlow. Our controller also contemplates how to manage OpenStack in an hyperscale environment.”

“We’ve been one of the early contributors to OpenStack,” Larson stated. “We base our cloud environment, our cloud services on OpenStack and we’ve integrated it in our SDN solution.”