The ONUG event (Open Networking Users Group) for Fall 2013 is all set for October 29 and 30, bringing together a range of organizations and individuals interested in the world of networking.  The sector has undergone quite a transformation in recent years, largely due to software.  Virtualization is impacting every layer of the stack, and software-defined networking is making this space smarter and more efficient.

Event details

Hosted by JPMorgan Chase at their New York headquarters, day one of the two-day event will focus on the new ONUG Academy, which is all about tutorials and workshops open to the industry.  Day two is all about the ONUG Conference, which will be similar to the ONUG Spring format, and will include speaking sessions and business discussions for IT leaders.

Conference speakers include Najam Ahmad, Facebook Director of Network Engineering; Greg Lavender, CTO for Citigroup Cloud Architecture and Infrastructure Engineering; Shamim Akhtar, Comcast Senior Director of Network Strategy; John Considine, Verizon Terremark CTO, to name a few.

• Sign up + Follow

Registration is still open for interested attendees but if you can’t attend the event, you can alway rely on Twitter to get the latest buzz.  Follow ONUG on Twitter, @ONUG, or use the hashtag #ONUGFall2013 to see what others are saying about the event.

What to expect from #ONUG

ONUG was founded in 2012 by Ernest Lefner of Bank Of America and Nick Lippis of the Lippis Report, who recognized the need for a user driven initiative to expedite the deployment of open networking solutions.  ONUG is now a community of IT business leaders who exchange ideas and best practices for implementing Open Networking and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) designs. ONUG events are for IT executives, global network architects, and designers to learn from peers and early adopters managing private or public clouds, enterprise data centers, WAN or service provider networks.

ONUG directors have met with the “who’s who” of SDN-standards to hear what the groups are offering and to evaluate and compare offerings submitted to provide an evaluated input to the entire ONUG at the event to be held at the end of this month.

IT admins are growing tired of waiting for the slow roll out of SDN, now taking matters into their own hands.  They can no longer afford to remain passive when it comes to SDN, especially when it is considered the biggest industry disruption in 20 years.  ONUG gives IT workers a place to be heard, contributing to the standards being put in place by traditional vendors and new players alike.

Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman will be attending ONUG Fall 2013 and he’s looking forward to hearing directly from the users and examining how emerging standards are being incorporated into the visions presented by industry leaders like VMware and others.

“While the vendor community is battling over thought leadership of SDN, hyperscale companies like Google and large enterprises and service providers are looking for real solutions to solve the challenges of high growth rate.” says Miniman.  “The ONUG gives a loud industry voice to the user community to make sure that the future of networking meets the requirements of IT more than the agendas of a specific supplier.”

Though SDN is fairly new, it is now being used, or at least considered, for a variety of applications, such as those used to interconnect data centers or allow broadband service providers to operate their networks more efficiently and flexibility.

“Nearly one-fourth of the enterprises we interviewed for our new data center and SDN survey have already deployed SDN technology in their data centers, and 1/3 plan to do so by the end of next year,” said Sam Barnett, directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research. “This is impressive given the nascent nature of most SDN technologies and the relatively sophisticated IT community required to implement them.”

Several  of the big players in the industry are already investing on SDN.

3 Companies Putting SDN to Work

• HP

Hewlett-Packard will be launching a cloud-based SDN marketplace by 2014, which will enable its partners to sell applications through a “secure, private portal” to customer environments.  To prepare for the HP SDN App Store, the company will make the HP SDN Development Kit this November to converged infrastructure partners and independent developers will be able to develop solutions for the store.

• RightScale

RightScale, a company that markets SaaS for managing the equipment that powers cloud computing, has extended its cloud management platform with SDN capabilities.  The new tool, Network Manager, introduces new features to its cloud management platform such as access controls, change log, and a set of standardized configurations that aim to make it easier for enterprises to migrate applications between different clouds.

• OpenDaylight

The OpenDaylight Project, the collaborative open source project that aims to accelerate adoption of SDN, recently shared a first glimpse of “Hydrogen” which includes new and legacy protocols such as OVSDB, OpenFlow 1.3.0, BGP and PCEP, as well as multiple methods for network virtualization and two initial applications that leverage the features of OpenDaylight such as Affinity Metadata Service to aid in policy management and Defense4All for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection.

Follow along as we build out a Software-Defined collection on Springpad!