Open Networking Lab (ONLAB)

The Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab) is a non-profit organization founded by SDN inventors and leaders from Stanford University and UC Berkeley to foster an open source community to develop tools and platforms to realize the full potential of SDN.

With ON.Lab roots in SDN research, members of its SDN ecosystem can explore new, real-life applications. They can experiment with the latest SDN concepts and thinking from renowned research labs. Networks today are described too often as closed, proprietary, complex, operationally expensive, inflexible – in a nutshell, they impede innovation and progress rather than enabling them.

We have a vision of what networking could be through the promise of Software Defined Networking (SDN). With SDN, the control plane is separated from the data plane, the hardware innovation cycles are decoupled from the software innovation cycles. In an SDN-enabled world, Internet and Cloud innovation are able to accelerate innovation while significantly reducing the costs of building and operating networks.

At ON.Lab, our mission is: To bring openness and innovation to the Internet and Cloud for the public good.

We believe this mission is best achieved by pursuing the following goals in collaboration with our funding partners

• Build tools and platforms that enable and accelerate SDN and make them available through open source
• Educate the public on the benefits of SDN
• Provide thought leadership to ensure continued innovation around SDN for the benefit of the public

ON.Lab has a relatively small team of highly motivated and talented individuals, with experience and track records in industry and research labs, who are focused on creating high quality open source tools and platforms that members can use to explore the possibilities of SDN.