ONF forms Stratum to advance next-generation SDN interfaces

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced a new project, dubbed Stratum, with the aim of implementing a reference platform for a software-defined data plane based on white-box switches. To jump-start the project, Google is open sourcing the first revision of source code for Stratum. The ONF is a non-profit organization founded in 2011, which serves as an umbrella for a number of  projects. Among its chief contributions is OpenFlow, a protocol that enables a server to determine where network switches forward packets. It is recognized as one of the first standards of software-defined networking (SDN), which involves controlling network behavior through application program interfaces (APIs).