Recently F5 announced their purchase of Linerate Systems link. So why is this news? Well it’s the latest in a series of purchases by all the major players. VMWare bought Nicira link, Cisco didn’t acquire anyone (yet) but they’re making a lot of SDN noise and Citrix Xen is already built on open vSwitch.

Even the non networking focused vendors are moving; HP has been into SDN almost since it’s inception almost 6 years ago but have gotten more serious recently. IBM are doing it and even Microsoft are dipping their toes into the water although I’m not entirely sure they get it, they seem to just be calling their virtual switching in HyperV SDN which strictly speaking I guess it is.

I’ve already posted about how much I love the concept of SDN and it’s good to see it’s finally starting to get some major traction. Now I wonder how soon before it starts to make its way seriously into the DataCentre.