Software Defined Networking Working Group

Mission:

Contacts:

During the OMG meeting near Washington, DC, in March, the Middleware and Related Services Platform Task Force created a new working group for Software Defined Networking. This new working group was established to address an urgent need to set a vendor-neutral global standard for SDN, based on an open multi-stakeholder model with consensus and meritocracy. Standards development for SDN enables companies to innovate on top of that standard and create value-add for their customers. The standards created in the best interest of the SDN community mean that no single vendor will control hardware or software direction – and will give customers choice.

On April 15th, the SDN Working Group held its first meeting in Santa Clara, CA with 20 organizations in attendance. OMG’s Chairman and CEO, Dr. Richard Soley, opened the meeting with a description of OMG’s mission, standardization processes, and liaison processes (especially with ISO). Dr. Soley also explained the importance of standards alongside any open-source project- in particular, the need for them in the SDN space. The group’s chair, Manish Patil then led a discussion on the need for standardization efforts in the SDN space, focusing on the separation between Open Source (bits) and Open Standards (the how) and the need for work to be carried out simultaneously on both fronts. The floor was finally opened to a roundtable discussion of key focus areas for standardization: Northbound APIs, the controllers space, and Southbound APIs. Overall, the meeting was a great success with many new work efforts giving the group definitive direction.

These tasks include:

Developing a candidate-first standard (likely to be the abstraction of the OpenFlow protocol and what can be standardized from OpenFlow for Control Plane);
Putting together a visual representation of the current state of SDN and what its ecosystem looks like today;
Developing a draft of recommended Northbound API and Services topology based on an SOA vision of the SDN space;
Draft two or more case studies relevant to the SDN space to help drive standards requirements and priorities.

The meeting minutes of the SDN Working Group meeting held in Las Vegas, NV on May 7, 2013 are now available here. The next WG meeting will be on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 at OMGï's technical meeting at the Radisson Blu hotel in Berlin, Germany. Email the chair at SDN-Chair@omg.org if you are interested in attending these meetings or would like to learn more about participating in the SDN Working Group.

Chair:

Manish Patil
Dell

How to get involved:

If you are interested in getting involved with this group, want more information or would like to come as a guest to an upcoming meeting and obtain temporary access to the mailing list, please contact one of our Account Representative or contact the Chair.

Working Groups

The group intends to develop a roadmap for standardization, with first standards to be completed in 2013. All participants are requested to bring ideas for specific standards to the meeting, with likely focus on the lack of "northbound" SDN standards in the marketplace.

Email Lists:

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If you have any questions about adopted specifications, please feel free to contact the OMG tech-editor.