Oracle lights up open SDN, joins OpenDaylight Project
Oracle has said it’s joining the OpenDaylight Project, an open-source software-defined networking alliance, as a silver member.
The company says it wants to bake OpenDaylight’s software into its Solaris 11.2 as soon as possible. When it does so, customers will be able to “use a common and open SDN platform with OpenStack to manage Oracle Solaris-based clouds,” says the company.
It’s somewhat predictable that Oracle would want to join OpenDaylight, and also highly significant. The move is predictable because Oracle has already thrown its considerable weight behind OpenStack, and so it makes sense to go all in and join OpenDaylight too. It’s also predictable when you consider that a whopping 95 percent of practioners said they want open SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) solutions. As for the significance, Oracle’s size and reputation is an extremely positive endorsement of the open standard.
It also means we’ll see Oracle make a much bigger commitment to SDN. As noted in the company’s announcement on the matter, users of Solaris will now be able to control and use their resources using the new standard.
Another interesting nugget is that Oracle will now enable compatibility with OpenStack Neutron and OpenDaylight SDN, which will allow its customers “to deploy applications in highly available, secure and flexible Oracle Solaris virtual machine instances.” That’s a nice little value add-on for Solaris, and together with Oracle’s other recent releases, makes the company look more and more willing to support just about any kind of cloud one might want to run.
Nevertheless we should point out that Oracle hasn’t thrown its entire lot with OpenDaylight – it’s only signed up as a silver member, which is the lowest level of membership.
