Last week the delegates at Networking Field Day 5 met with Cisco, and we had a great set of presentations and discussions throughout the day. None however equaled the discussion on “Openflow vs Cisco onePK” at the end of the day for the sheer volume of uncompromisingly black and white opinions that were expressed in order to score points in that argument.
The problem for me is that at some point, there’s a danger that taking the hyperbole too far* could cause your argument to actually sound like debating trickery rather than a reasoned position. And so it was for me yesterday listening to the argument that Cisco should offer a basic switch that just supports OpenFlow, rather than wasting time developing an offering supporting onePK. The parallel given was that people tend to buy switches with way more features than they need (or too high a software feature set), so it is better to offer something minimal that is more appropriate.
(*) I know … refer me to the Department of Tautology Department for punishment
