Internet2 is a joint venture between about two dozen universities in the US that was started in the 90s’ with the goal of delivering the academia a better IP network. It raised about $100 million in funding to date and right now, the construction of an OpenFlow based software-defined network is the number one item on the of the priorities list.

Some 300 engineers working on the project will meet at this week’s 012 ESCC/Internet2 Joint Techs meeting at Stanford University to discuss plans for the nearly completed network, which will be used to power – among other things – the data intensive applications used for research nowadays. Recently 100G Ethernet MLX and NetIron routers from Brocade and MX routers from Juniper were installed at over 35 locations – all three are so-called OpenFlow-enabled systems that facilitate the kind of agile administration that Internet2 is gunning for.

“As an SDN, the Innovation Platform is designed to advance education, university businesses, and global Big Data collaborative research outcomes to enable new research initiatives and new cycles of global economic development,” reports the PC Observer. “The programmability aspect will enable further innovation in application development across a community of developers as well, the organization asserts, by allowing network ‘slicing,’ or the ability to isolate subsets of the network for application development.”

OpenFlow is the de facto standard for software-defined networking, but this trend is not confined to this one industry standard. That’s according to Nick Ilyadis , the chief technology officer for Broadcom who like many other experts sees a big opportunity in this field and stopped by theCube for an interview at the Dell Storage Forum. And he sees that in not only OpenFlow but also in other projects being carried out by several different companies.