Arizona State University (ASU) is implementing OpenFlow 1.3 in its research network, aided by Brocade.

The primary benefit was lower latency, as ASU explains in Brocade's news release today. The effects of connecting through multiple switches and a firewall, plus the application of access control lists, limited network speeds to 2 Gb/s, well short of the 10 Gb/s theoretical maximum speed on ASU's networking gear.

One ASU group that will be using the OpenFlow 1.3 network is the Global Security Initiative, a research hub that works with the U.S. Department of Defense and also studies areas such as climate-change policy and water-supply security.

OpenFlow 1.3 is the version that's become the norm for production deployments. OpenFlow was the original flag-bearer for software-defined networking (SDN) but has fallen out of the headlines in recent years.

That's partly because as large vendors have gotten into the SDN game, their products — which don't necessarily need OpenFlow — have drawn the spotlight.

But some OpenFlow supporters say vendors' support for the protocol has been incomplete. For example, one key OpenFlow 1.3 enhancement was the use of multiple memory tables, but that feature hasn't been implemented in all vendors' equipment, as Saurav Das, principal architect at the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), recently told SDxCentral.

Photo: Kevin Dooley of ASU, on Flickr. CC2.0 license. Photo has been cropped.