MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Big Switch Networks today announced a revolution in open software-defined networking (SDN) with the introduction of the industry’s first thin switching software platform, Switch Light. Switch Light is open source software that can be deployed as a virtual switch for server hypervisors and in merchant silicon-based physical switching platforms, commonly known as white box switches. Switch Light liberates customers from historically proprietary, closed networking architectures, and accelerates the adoption of OpenFlow-based networking, significantly lowering capital costs by providing choice in networking hardware and dramatically reducing operational overhead by tying together virtual and physical networks with an automated and centralized common provisioning and management model. Initially, Switch Light will be available to run on a range of merchant silicon-based physical switches (Switch Light for Broadcom) and virtual switches (Switch Light for Linux), and will be ported to other data plane devices in the future.Switch Light extends Big Switch Networks Open SDN Suite, which includes both open source and commercial solutions for the community and enterprise customers. Switch Light is based on the open source Indigo Project, a sub-project within Project Floodlight, the leading open source SDN community project (see related announcement). Project Floodlight is a community of developers and users and is the source of the Floodlight controller, the Indigo OpenFlow agent, and several open-source applications and utilities. Big Switch will make Switch Light available free of charge and offer technical support and a range of services to commercial users when Switch Light is deployed with other offerings of the Big Switch Open SDN Suite – Big Network Controller, Big Virtual Switch, or Big Tap.Big Switch is working with go to market partners for Switch Light at every link of the value chain, including Broadcom as a leading merchant silicon partner, and Accton and Quanta for merchant silicon-based switches. Extreme Networks, a key Big Switch data center switching partner, will be enhancing their hybrid switch offerings by supporting Switch Light. Together, these partnerships will provide customers will a powerful range of complete Open SDN solutions, based on open standards, open source and open architectures at competitive prices and feature sets.Big Switch Networks