Mellanox Technologies announced its continued commitment to promote the development of next-generation, open networking interfaces and open source data center and cloud networking technologies. As part of its commitment, Mellanox is pleased to announce its memberships in the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) and OpenStack communities.

"Joining ONF, OVA and OpenStack demonstrates our unwavering support for the open networking and open source community, and our commitment to provide the most efficient connectivity solutions for virtualized data centers and cloud applications," said Motti Beck, director of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. "We believe the joint collaboration will bring on a new era of innovative technological advances and best practices that will enable the most efficient solutions to complex networking issues faced by our customers."

ONF is a non-profit open networking organization committed to accelerating the adoption rate of a new networking approach called Software-Defined Networking (SDN). SDN enables owners and operators to control and manage their networks through the adoption of an open software interface to better serve their users. ONF aims to standardize the OpenFlow protocol, which increases network functionality while reducing total cost of ownership through simplified hardware, software, and management.

"OpenFlow/SDN is enabling more innovation in every part of the network - particularly in the data center. It is great to see more companies adding momentum to the effort," said Nick Mckeown, founding director of ONF.

The Open Virtualization Alliance is a consortium dedicated to fostering the adoption of Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) as an open virtualization alternative, accelerating the emergence of an ecosystem of third-party solutions around KVM, increasing overall awareness and understanding of KVM, encouraging interoperability, promoting best practices and highlighting examples of customer successes.

"We are very pleased to welcome Mellanox into the Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA)," said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business at Red Hat and a founding member of the Open Virtualization Alliance. "This groundswell of support for the Open Virtualization Alliance from industry leaders and innovators shows the overwhelming demand for KVM as the open virtualization alternative. KVM delivers leading performance, scalability and security, making it the ideal alternative to proprietary virtualization technologies."

OpenStack is a global software community of technologists, developers, researchers, corporations and cloud computing experts dedicated to developing open source cloud technologies standards and delivering a massively scalable cloud operating system. OpenStack provides software and standards garnered from an open source community and enables organizations to release large-scale cloud deployments for private or public clouds using standard hardware.