Cisco's lead smart guy and rock star, David Meyer, jumps ship for Brocade

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Cisco's lead smart guy and rock star, David Meyer, jumps ship for Brocade

"On the OpenFlow front, I went to the source--our lead smart guy on our OpenFlow efforts--David Meyer."

Hershey, PA: Thu, 10/18/12 - 11:59pm View comments

Cisco Distinguished Engineer David Meyer, a 14-year Cisco veteran, has joined Brocade as its new Chief Technology Officer and Chief Scientist for its Service Provider Business.

And according to Brocade:

"Meyer will be responsible for working with tier-1 service providers, cloud hosting providers and Web 2.0 content providers worldwide. As an expert advisor, he will help customers develop cloud-optimized network architectures to support next-generation services and applications. In addition, he will actively engage in industry-wide discussions on seminal networking issues and evangelize Brocade's unique solutions in the areas of Ethernet fabrics, advanced routing and SDN."

Well, I've got to admit I'm impressed with Brocade's talent coup over Cisco!

How so?

Because Cisco virtualization and SDN guru Omar Sultan (whom I admire), previously stated:

"David Meyer has been a rock star across the board including contributions to the 'OF futures' discussions and recently received an award from the ONF for his contributions. To net things out, Cisco expects to be a pacesetter with regards to network programmability and SDN and our efforts with ONF will continue to be part of that strategy."

And earlier, Sultan had also gushed:

"On the OpenFlow front, I went to the source--our lead smart guy on our OpenFlow efforts--David Meyer. David is a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems, where he works on future directions for Internet technologies such as OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking."

Earlier today I asked Brocade's new Chief Technology Officer and Chief Scientist for its Service Provider Business, David Meyer, his take on the future of SDN.

This was Meyer's response:

SDN has the potential to be an agent of change in networking, transforming the way we've built and operated networks for decades. What a great time to be in networking! Brocade's SDN strategy is composed of three elements:

Network virtualization
Network services, enabled by a diverse set of APIs and protocols including OpenFlow
Network and Cloud Services Orchestration

Network virtualization is a clear macro-trend in the networking industry. Virtualized network infrastructure, enabled by overlay technologies improves network flexibility, enabling on-demand infrastructure in highly scalable, multitenancy environments. Brocade's strategy is to deliver overlay technology-agnostic switches that support tunneling technologies such as VXLAN, NVGRE, and STT.

As the first networking vendor to deliver OpenFlow in "hybrid mode", Brocade's customers can simultaneously deploy traditional Layer 2/3 forwarding and OpenFlow. This allows customers to integrate OpenFlow into existing networks, providing the programmatic control offered by SDN for specific flows while the remaining traffic is handled with traditional routing/forwarding techniques. We are developing comprehensive cloud management and orchestration interfaces through orchestration framework plug-ins and standards-based RESTful interfaces on our data center switching platforms.

This strategy will separate the traditional vertically-integrated network stack, giving network operators more options while providing new platforms for innovation.

Brocade has been very active in the SDN community for years: the company publicly endorsed OpenFlow in 2010, demonstrated the technology to customers since late 2010, and we recently were selected to be the networking supplier for Internet2's new 100GE OpenFlow-based backbone. We believe the majority of early-adopters will be those organizations who see SDN as a part of their larger Cloud strategy. It's these organizations that have the most urgent need to solve some of their IT challenges.

David Meyer when he was with Cisco at the OpenFlow Symposium from Stephen Foskett on Vimeo.