Juniper Networks has left the OpenDaylight project – an effort to develop an open source foundation for Software-Defined Networking (SDN).

Juniper was a founding member and a platinum-level sponsor – which meant it had to contribute ten developers and $500,000 annually. Meanwhile VMWare has reduced the level of financial support it provides to the project from gold level to silver.

The fact that both vendors have disappeared from the sponsor page was discovered by SDX Central, and later confirmed by Neela Jacques, executive director of the project.

Take the money and run

OpenDaylight is a collaborative non-profit project established in April 2013 and managed by the Linux Foundation. It aims to create a common platform for SDN which can then be customized by different vendors.

SDN separates the control plane from the data plane, allowing the intelligence and state of the network to be managed centrally while abstracting the complexity of the underlying physical infrastructure.

After almost two years of being involved with OpenDaylight, Juniper has left the project and is likely to focus resources on its own OpenContrail SDN controller.

It has, however, joined Open Compute – the initiative which openly shares standardized infrastructure component designs for things like compute nodes, storage servers, network switches and even specialized racks.

This follows the announcement of a Juniper switch that runs proprietary Junos software on top of hardware developed by OCP.