Software Defined Networking (SDN) as well as traditional networking have long required the use of policy constructs. At the Interop conference, Cisco today is formally announcing a new effort to enable policy to seamlessly move across the network in an open standards-based approach.
The new effort is called the OpFlex protocol, and it has already gained the initial support of Canonical, Citrix, Microsoft, and Red Hat. Mike Cohen, director of Product Management at Cisco, explained to Enterprise Networking Planet that OpFlex is a new protocol that opens up the southbound interface for policy in a networking environment.