Here's a glance at the past week's news in software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and related areas.

Chipmaker Marvell has always been a family affair, run by the husband-and-wife team of Sehat Sutardja (CEO) and Weili Dai (president). Sutardja's brother has also served as CTO, until now. Marvell announced this week that Pantas Sutardja has stepped down, with his spot being filled by Zining Wu, who is vice president of data storage technology and has been with the company since 1999.

Pantas also left Marvell's board back in June, so it's not clear if the CTO change has anything to do with the activist shareholder that's been dogging the company.

Egenera added support for Hyper-V and integration with Microsoft Active Directory to its Cloud Suite. "What we've seen in the last six months from our service provider customers is a lot of interest in Microsoft," says John Humphreys, Egenera's vice president of sales and marketing. In some cases, that's because Hyper-V has become a suitable alternative to VMware's vSphere, and customers want to be able to use both depending on which one's cheaper.

Cloud Suite, a portal and service catalogue aimed at end users, first found favor with enterprises, Humphreys says. But in the past year, Cloud Suite has become primarily a service-provider product, thanks partly to its carrier-relevant features such as a pricing engine and a quoting engine.

... Gigamon added NetFlow generation to its Visibility Fabric. The fabric's normal job is to forward traffic to tools that analyze packets; now it's going to work with tools for flow analysis as well.

... Semiconductor vendor Freescale is making its OpenFlow controller software available on an open-source basis. It's implemented entirely in C, at least according to a post on LinkedIn. The result is another open-source option alongside POX, Beacon, Floodlight, OpenDaylight, ONOS, and others. (See Controller Wars 2.0.)

... Nuage Networks announced Pennsylvania mega-hospital UPMC as a customer for the Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) and 7850 Virtualized Services Gateway (VSG).

... The OpenDaylight Project added ZTE and Coriant as members. ZTE is the "other" Chinese equipment company; it's big but has to live in Huawei's shadow. Coriant is the former optical transport arm of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) with a bit of Sycamore Networks thrown in.

... Not that this is particularly important, but OpenDaylight, after christening its first code release "Hydrogen," apparently did not have a master plan for naming future releases. The options are getting discussed on one of the mailing lists, with the obvious suggestion being to just follow the periodic table. Downside: After Helium, they'd have to wait through Lithium, Beryllium, and Boron before getting back to an element with a cool name.