Mellanox Announce 'Open Ethernet' Initiative

Mellanox Technologies launched what they call the “Generation of Open Ethernet” initiative - an alternative approach to traditional closed-code Ethernet switches which they claim will give end users more flexibility and freedom to design data centres.

It's a simple yet very worthwhile idea.  Unlike operating systems, where organisations can choose to have open-source derived distributions such as SUSE or Red Hat, restricted OS such as Windows, or completely straightjacketed offerings (cough, IOS, cough), networking vendors have historically been extremely reluctant to give you so much as a peep under the bonnet, let alone give their ethernets a tickle.  So, you got a switch and very little / no room beyond the manual to do what you want with it. 

This may have been tolerable then but, as Mellanox reason, with technology evolving into a service organisations need to have much more freedom to get their hands dirty with their network to get it moving up the speed and scale graph - and giving network Admin the option to toy with code, Mellanox believe, is the best route forward.  Mellanox specifically point fingers at OpenFlow and SDN deployments, which they believe are not working to their optimum performance due to vendors locking down their code and leaving a narrow API to provide some pre-defined config settings. .

Open Ethernet also includes the capability to fully customize, through the open code, a variety of open source management software packages, support standard OpenFlow controllers, and more. Open Ethernet is supported on Mellanox’s 10/20/40/56GbE switches, with forward compatibility to future Mellanox Ethernet solutions.

Eyal Waldman, CEO and chairman of Mellanox Technologies, gave the announcement his seal of approval. “Mellanox Open Ethernet allows users to gain control of their network and data center, and to achieve higher utilization, efficiency and return on investment, and will enable our customers to add differentiation and competitive advantages in their networking infrastructure.  Earl clearly expects some big things from Open Ethernet: "We have been seeing wide and strong support for this initiative from our partners and users, and expect to see a growing community around our initiative.”

You can learn more about Mellanox’s Open Ethernet here