Dell has announced a partnership with Midokura, a Japanese start-up that develops Software Defined Networking (SDN) software for OpenStack.

Under the terms of the deal, Midokura will join the Open Networking initiative and Dell will offer MidoNet software with some of its switches and servers. The partnership will also produce a validated reference architecture for an SDN switch.

“Midokura, like Dell, is committed to expanding the Open Networking initiative to meet the needs of today’s modern enterprises and help deliver an open foundation for compute, storage and networking infrastructure,” said Dan Mihai Dumitriu, CEO and co-founder, Midokura.

“We’ve already successfully teamed up with Dell to bridge virtual and physical networks and we look forward to deepening our collaboration to create an open, converged infrastructure for enterprises to support clouds that are easy to scale and operate.”

Last month, Midokura released the code for MidoNet to then open source community.

A party of three
The Open Networking initiative was established by Dell and Cumulus Networks in January 2014 to stimulate the development of standards-based networking equipment. So far, the two have been bundling Dell Open Networking switches together with the Cumulus Linux operating system.

Now, Open Networking has added a third component - MidoNet, a highly-distributed network virtualization overlay for OpenStack.

MidoNet will leverage Dell switches to route the traffic from virtual machines to non-virtualized, physical workloads such as high-performance databases, email servers and legacy systems at line rate.

“What this shows is that we’re actively connecting the dots with like-minded companies to upend the traditional, black-box model of networking,” said Tom Burns, vice president and general manager, Dell Networking.

“That old model is too rigid, too locked and too slow to innovate. Dell’s Open Networking initiative is about being open, flexible and software-defined to help maximize our customers’ application environments.”

Dell and MidoNet will also run a joint go-to-market program and sign a global reseller agreement.

MidoNet is already available in Dell’s Download Store.