For some reason the whitepaper link on the main OpenFlow website is broken, so here is: - a Coral cache version (http://preview.tinyurl.com/5sr9vsc http://pre

For some reason the whitepaper link on the main OpenFlow website is broken, so here is: - a Coral cache version (http://preview.tinyurl.com/5sr9vsc http://preview.tinyurl.com/5sr9vsc) - the Google cache version put through Quick View (http://tinyurl.com/6hxyxz2 http://tinyurl.com/6hxyxz2) The GigaOM article was far too basic and vague for me, so the white paper proved to be a breath of fresh air! Whereas the GigaOM article flounders over explaining potential commercial applications for OpenFlow, the whitepaper takes a far more humble approach: "Today, there is almost no practical way to experiment with new network protocols (e.g. new routing protocols, or alternative to IP) in sufficiently realistic settings (e.g. at scale carrying real traffic) to gain the confidence needed for their widespread deployment...a more promising approach [then contemporary commerical and research solutions] is to compromise on generality and to seek a degree of switch flexibility that is: - Amenable to high-performance and low-cost implementations. - Capable of supporting a broad range of research. - Assured to isolate experimental traffic from production traffic. - Consistent with vendors' needs for closed platforms. This paper describes the OpenFlow Switch - a specification that is an initial attempt to meet these four goals."