Broadcasting live from the Open Networking Summit held in the Santa Clara Convention Center, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, Stu Miniman invited Brent Salisbury and Madhu Venguopal into theCUBE to talk about the key developments and deployments in the industry and to elaborate on their work with Red Hat.

Madhu Venguopal, Sr. Principal Software Engineer with Red Hat, admitted that back in 2010, after being involved with Cisco for a very long time, he “got really bored with networking as a whole,” because “it was stale and stagnant” and he decided to quit. He considers himself lucky that he attended the ONS in 2011, when he got very inspired by Martin Casado. Soon after he started working on a controller and later on with OpenDaylight.

“I’ve been working on OpenDaylight basecode since 2011 onwards, and late last year I joined Red Hat because I wanted to be in the open source way of things,” confided Venguopal.

Brent Salisbury, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, was invited to give the end-user viewpoint. “Why did you get involved?” asked Miniman.

“There was a lot of interest from the research side – architecture, operations. I’ve been doing this for 10, 15 years, and nothing had really changed. We would go through the same problem over and over until you quit the industry altogether and go do something else,” explained Salisbury, reinforcing Madhu Venguopal’s statements that the network environment just stagnated.

“There is a misconception that code is very important for any open source project. But for every line of code that we push, there’s probably eight hours behind it banging your head against the wall, doing integration,” added Salisbury.

“Open networking is the best thing that happened to networking,” agreed Madhu. “As a developer, it is the first time I am enjoying the coding, because the architecture is completely different than what it used to be before. Before we felt like network engineers. Now we feel like programmers, and it’s fun.”

Open networking: Where to start?

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“Where do you recommend people to start?” asked Miniman.

“A lot of our focus is at the soft edge – anything that’s virtualizable today: servers, hypervizors,” stated Salisbury. “I love Red Hat because they take proprietary concepts and create platforms out of them that other people can come and innovate on.”

There are not a lot of alternatives, and the industry is actually pretty smart to consolidate around projects that reduce risk around the incumbents.

“How open will this be?” inquired Stu Miniman referring to OpenDaylight. “Is this just a control play from the vendor community or is it truly going to be an open project?”

“If you look at OpenDaylight as a community, the vendors and engineers are all developers working together on a common cause,” explained Madhu. “The first release was not going to be the product release; it was a great occasion to talk to the customers and the partners.”

“I still we’re still defining what it is we’re trying to do; if we’re looking for the killer app, it’s pretty clear that’s going to be network virtualization,”said Brent Salisbury. “There’s really Capex and Opex savings because to do SDN it requires storage and compute orchestration. The network centric approach is going to have that – there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.”