Big Switch is drastically shrinking its support for the OpenDaylight consortium, potentially setting up a battle between certain incumbent vendors, led by Cisco, and what Big Switch describes as the OpenFlow protocol's true believers.

The company is planning to announce the move Wednesday morning on its blog.

Big Switch will still technically be involved as a silver-level member of OpenDaylight, but it's ending its status as a platinum member and quitting the consortium's steering committee.

By being a silver member, rather than dropping out completely, Big Switch can keep an eye on the proceedings. Many of the big vendors involved in OpenDaylight are sitting at just the silver level -- particularly Broadcom, HP and Intel.

For Big Switch, the last straw was the consortium's choice of controller for software-defined networking (SDN).

"SDN, and this is the Open Networking Foundation definition, is about creating the common abstraction between the data plane and the controller -- not creating abstractions for other abstractions," says Jason Matlof, Big Switch's vice president of marketing. "It's not worth dropping ourselves back a year or two in development."

Here's what he's talking about. Big Switch's controller and the Cisco ONE Controller were both submitted as options, and OpenDaylight has chosen to go with a mix of the two, an option called the Dixon-Erickson Proposal. Big Switch is OK with that, but the company doesn't like that the starting point for the OpenDaylight controller will be the Cisco service abstraction layer (SAL), which is an abstraction of OpenFlow -- that's what Matlof means by "abstractions for other abstractions."

Big Switch wanted the starting point to be something more neutral. The result, Matlof says, is that OpenDaylight is "doing a controller that's two years behind where we are today."

He says Big Switch will go back to focusing on promoting OpenFlow fabrics and networks based on generic-hardware switches.

The latter camp got a major vote of support in May, at Interop in Las Vegas, the Open Compute Project announced it would take on networking. That is, there's now an open-source group intent on introducing generic hardware into the Ethernet switching world. (See Open Compute Project Takes On Networking.)

Big Switch is trying to play up its move as a protest rooted not in politics but in technology.

"Customers are asking for all this, and we just can't be driven by the beast that is ODL [OpenDaylight]. It's just a time suck," Matlof says.

In a prepared statement midday Wednesday, the OpenDaylight group said "the facts do not support" the "David vs. Goliath" attitude Big Switch is rocking:

— Craig Matsumoto, Managing Editor, Light Reading