NEC today announced their participation in the GEC3 OpenFlow demo, and their intention to support OpenFlow going forward. Press releases are online in English and Japanese. The GEC OpenFlow demo includes several NEC Switches at Stanford as well as in JGN2plus in Tokyo. NEC has been instrumental in working with Stanford to make this demo happen across continents.

The NEC IP8800 switches used in the demo are some of the best OpenFlow hardware that currently exists. They offer a good fan-out and are able to do OpenFlow at line rates. The only bad news is that what we are using are prototypes and they are not available commercially. However to quote from the release:

“NEC plans to support OpenFlow features in its future products and  to encourage universities, public testbed projects, and researchers to  experiment with innovative network ideas. “

So far we have had fairly few details about OpenFlow capable hardware on this blog, but expect this to change in the future. If you are interested in OpenFlow hardware, feel free to get in touch with us.

Tags: demo, gec, nec, press release

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 2:16 pm and is filed under OpenFlow Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.