Dell is announcing Wednesday that it's upping its OpenDaylight Project membership to the platinum level.

Dell had been a founding member of the open source project, but only at the silver level. The jump upwards, being announced at the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, makes Dell the project's 10th platinum member, following HP, which took the same leap in May.

It's not surprising given Dell's recent eagerness to get involved with all angles of software-defined networking (SDN) and other ideas related to rethinking the network and the data center. The company announced kickstarter kits for network functions virtualization (NFV) earlier this week. More generally, it's carved out partnerships with Big Switch Networks, Cumulus Networks, and Red Hat.

OpenDaylight might be getting a bit heavy with platinum members, but that's a sign that the initial skepticism around the project has been fading. Many vendors joined OpenDaylight seemingly just to keep a wary eye on the project, either because they were suspicious of Cisco and IBM's early backing, or because they didn't know if the open-source effort would really get off the ground.

Dell and HP weren't alone in proceeding cautiously. Juniper had joined OpenDaylight as a founding platinum member but, at first, didn't offer up the resources and code expected from a member of that stature. That began to change this year, as Juniper proposed an OpenContrail plug-in in April, shortly after adding Kent Watsen as a representative to the OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee. (Every platinum-level sponsor gets a TSC board seat.)

With OpenDaylight having completed two code releases, Hydrogen and Helium, questions about the project seem to have been settled. Project teams are also learning as they go, when it comes to things like release schedules and vehicles. Helium, which came out about two weeks ago, introduced an à-la-carte code delivery method based on Apache Karaf containers.

OpenDaylight's other platinum members besides Dell and HP are Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, IBM, Juniper, Microsoft, and Red Hat.