HP is upgrading its membership in OpenDaylight in a big way, increasing its commitment from $20,000 per year to $500,000 plus 10 full-time equivalent staff.

"SDN has been a core part of our networking strategy," says Sarwar Raza, director for cloud networking and SDN for the Networking division at HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ). "Our increasing commitment here is just a continuation of the strategy that we laid out several years ago around creating the industry's most open, most interoperable solution." (See HP Shines Brighter on OpenDaylight and Defining SDN & NFV.)

As part of the upgrade to Platinum membership, Raza will join OpenDaylight's board of directors, and David Lenrow, distinguished architect, HP, will join OpenDaylight's Technical Steering Committee.

Other Platinum OpenDaylight members are Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD), Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO), Citrix Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CTXS), Ericsson AB (Nasdaq: ERIC), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), and Red Hat Inc. (NYSE: RHT).

HP was a founding member of OpenDaylight when the organization launched last year, at the lowest membership level, Silver. Now, HP is at the highest level, Platinum. The increased commitment by HP is a big boost for OpenDaylight's vision of creating a standard, open source network controller, says OpenDaylight Executive Director Nicholas "Neela" Jacques. "They're one of the few vendors out there that has the hardware, the services, and actually operates a cloud," he says. "There's so much they can bring to the project and so much the project can give back."

HP's endorsement is also a step toward removing uncertainty about the future of OpenDaylight, inherent in the early days of any ambitious open source project, Jacques said.

Even as a Silver member, HP exceeded the minimum requirements for contribution, Raza says. The company contributed to the OpenDaylight user interface, vSwitch management, and is leading development of a product to add an authorization and authentication framework.

In addition to OpenDaylight, HP is a leading contributor to OpenStack. This involvement will help improve OpenDaylight and OpenStack integration, as well as making it easier for OpenDaylight development processes to benefit from the example of the more mature OpenStack project, Jacques said.

The HP announcement comes soon after Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR), another Platinum OpenDaylight member, heated up its tepid relationship with OpenDaylight, naming a representative to the organization's Technical Steering Committee and submitting the OpenContrail Plugin to the organization. (See Juniper Gives OpenDaylight Some Loving.)

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