Reds hoist flag of glorious SDN internationale

Huawei and Red Hat are the latest vendors to join hands and clink champagne in the ever-expanding software-defined networks (SDN) love-in.

Under the partnership, the venerable Linux and open source expert will provide its OpenStack implementation to the Chinese telco vendor, which will run up its FusionSphere Cloud OS to act as the management layer.

The combo, according to Red Hat's announcement, will give customers “a unified, flexible and production-ready” solution to support their network function virtualisation (NFV) efforts.

As always in such collaborations, the two companies promise to drop code back into OpenStack, with a particular focus on “NFV enabling features”. The two companies will also prep a certification program for their joint solutions.

2014 has been a year of SDN and NFV partnerships, whether it's between hardware vendors (like Ericsson and Ciena), hardware/software (such as this arrangement), or pairings of software vendors (Alcatel-Lucent spinoff Nuage with Oracle).

In the mean time, SDN users can have the joy of another expansion to a code base that Vulture South hears could do with some attention. Too many incoming vendors, we've been told, are happy to leave their SDN newborns at the door of the church, but show far less interest in helping clear a backlog of open bugs. ®