We'd like to think that an “extreme” edition of the weekly roundup of software-defined networking (SDN) news would include paratroopers and juggling fire. But no, it just means Extreme Networks did something.

Extreme Networks is about to double in size with the $180 million acquisition of Enterasys, announced Thursday. Extreme has decent technology and was one of the first switch vendors to proclaim support for OpenFlow, but it's always been handicapped by its size.

Analyst Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research notes that consolidation among enterprise vendors has been long-awaited. He thinks these two are a good fit, but he also lists a whole lot of other consolidation candidates, an indication that this deal is just one step in lowering the glut of vendors.

Source: OpenDaylight.

The OpenDaylight Project publicly outlined the contents of its first release, named Hydrogen, and promised to show it off at two events: Sept. 18 in New Orleans, and Oct. 22 in Edinburgh, Scotland.

You can get a glimpse in the image below (click for a larger version). And here's the press release's quickie summary of Hydrogen contents:

To accommodate a wide range of use cases OpenDaylight Hydrogen includes new and legacy protocols such as OVSDB, OpenFlow 1.3.0, BGP and PCEP. It also includes multiple methods for network virtualization and two initial applications that leverage the features of OpenDaylight: Affinity Metadata Service to aid in policy management and Defense4All for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection. A plugin for OpenStack Neutron has been integrated, and the Open vSwitch Database project will allow management from within OpenStack. (See attached diagram.)

Projects were contributed by Cisco, ConteXtream, Ericsson, IBM, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), NEC, Pantheon, Plexxi, Radware, and developers Brent Salisbury and Evan Zeller from the University of Kentucky.

The IT executives who comprise the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) will get a voice in the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), as the ONF has been announced as an ONUG partner. You can see the groups melding when Rob Sherwood, representing the ONF, gives a tutorial, “Integrating OpenFlow and OpenStack,” at the ONUG's Oct. 29-30 event in New York.

On Monday, BTI Systems announced VK, apparently the largest social network in Europe, as a customer. VK's territory is Eastern Europe, which explains why the name is unfamiliar to American ears, but it caters to a wide diaspora of users and built its own network, eschewing service providers altogether, because its anticipated capacity needs were so high.

So, VK is officially interesting, but when it comes to SDN/NFV, it's only in the “probable grounds” stage. VK isn't even using BTI's newer 7800 platform yet; those boxes can house an applications blade, a card running Linux on a Cavium chip. There's NFV potential there, but VK is sticking to the BTI 7000 series and might not add 7800s until the need for 100G connections arises. (The 7000s don't have 100G interfaces.)

Still, given the direction that the social networks in North America have gone, VK could be an interesting customer to watch.