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OpenFlow is an example of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), whichprovides an open, standards-based interface to control how data packetsare forwarded through the network. The OpenFlow standard also pro-vides a basic set of global management abstractions, which can be used tocontrol features such as topology changes and packet filtering.

OpenFlow takes advantage of the fact that most modern Ethernetswitches and routers contain flow tables, which run at line rate and areused to implement functions such as quality of service (QoS), securityfirewalls, and statistical analysis of data streams. OpenFlow standardizes acommon set of functions that operate on these flows and will be extendedin the future as the standard evolves.

A IBM Whitepaper about OpenFlow has been published in may 2011 to explain OpenFlow.

Now we see several offering coming to the market which support OpenFlow. The OpenFlow-based IBM RackSwitch G8264 (a 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet switch) has been oen of the first switches that support this.

Source: IBM Whitepaper about OpenFlow, OpenFlow.org, Open Networking Foundation

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