At a forum held today for institutional investors, private company executives and technologists, Steve Garrison, vice president of product marketing at Pica8, told attendees that he believes large data center organizations should consider the company’s approach to Open Networking right now to solve their most pressing data center challenges despite their belief that Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a disruptive technology and not ready for production environments.

Speaking at the Emerging Technology Summit hosted by Pacific Crest Securities in San Francisco, Garrison initially defined and described how Open Networking decouples hardware from the switching operating system, which helps data center environments to leverage the benefits of commoditized hardware, which reduces capital expenses (CapEx). He then told attendees how that customization and programmability helps lower operational costs (OpEx) through data centers managers being able to more easily increase the number of racks or servers as well as aggregate large arrays of servers full of CPUs that scale to what applications need dynamically. Garrison also anticipates that data centers will enjoy further OpEx reductions and less unplanned downtime when they start using software to program the network without having to make physical topology changes.

“I believe people are getting caught up in the nomenclature rather than seeing that SDN or this new open approach to networking has powerful benefits that can help data centers right now,” said Garrison. “By having application performance not impacted by changes in the hardware, you can leverage a consistent software environment so that when hardware changes are required, that activity does not create a ripple of expensive management and operational issues.”

About Pica8, Inc.

Since 2009, Pica8 has been fulfilling the promise of true software defined networking (SDN) by providing the world’s first open, hardware-independent switching system. Pica8 open switches transform the data center by decoupling hardware from software. This new approach provides greater flexibility and adaptability, all while driving down implementation- and management-related costs of cloud and virtualized applications. Pica8 is a global company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit www.pica8.com.