SDN, or Software Defined Networking, is making the network programmable. Andrew Harding, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Big Switch Networks, stops by to talk with hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick of theCUBE, broadcasting live from the OpenStack Summit. OpenStack got a big lift form SDN, and legacy networking vendors better have considered it a wakeup call. The world is finally acknowledging SDN.

Last week Big Switch Networks today announced that it will ensure interoperability between Big Switch Networks Open SDN Suite and HP OpenFlow-enabled switches, providing customers with certified solutions that they can confidently deploy in SDN environments. Specifically:

• Big Network Controller

– a platform to deploy a wide range of network applications, including data center network virtualization, providing unified network intelligence, enterprise-class scalability and high-availability

• Big Tap application

– a network monitoring application for Open SDNs

It was announced that the two companies will test interoperability between the Big Network Controller and Big Tap application, and HP’s OpenFlow-enabled switches, which represent the industry’s largest installed base of over 15 million ports.

A big part of OpenStack is vendor neutrality and choice, according to Harding. Supporting that division of choice is how communities like OpenStack are innovating what currency is being transacted. Code is the new currency, technical innovation is the real change. You can no longer write a spec and wait it out. In communities like OpenStack, if there is something to be done or contributed, someone is going to find a way to do it.

Specific to Big Switch Networks, the innovation is in automizing workflows and networking. Big Switch Networks is a mixture of the purist and pragmatic coming together says Harding, and software-defined networking is making the network programmable. Having a physical infrastructure while having a logical ladder of top of that allows you to do less things manually, fewer things in a static way. Focused SDN products can address this natural issue of saving money and time compared to the legacy incubants like Cisco. “We can compete against Cisco with an open SDN offering that folks can get today.”

Furrier asked Harding if the term being thrown around infrastructure as code was a viable philiosphy and what was his take on it.

The old way was to have devices…golden fix confirgurations…it’s a natural next step to think, “wait these configurations can be dynamic.”…You can stop thinking about the world in a device by device manner, that’s the fundamental shift.

Harding briefly spoke about the ONS Summit 2013 and how Big Switch Networks’ CTO Rob Sherwood was doing a live demonstration of Switch Light. Switch Light is open source software that can be deployed as a virtual switch for server hypervisors and in merchant silicon-based physical switching platforms, commonly known as white box switches.

The feel of the interview and the OpenStack Summit is that software is in fact eating the world. The open source community is building up one significant head of steam. Neither are necessarily a bad thing either. No matter how good your team is, and how fast they can work…they can’t type as fast as code can execute.