Dell has upgraded its OpenDaylight membership from Silver to Platinum, meaning it will have to contribute another seven part-time developers  and pay in $500,000 annually to the project, which is building an open source SDN platform

The company hopes this donation will help accelerate the creation and adoption of a vendor-agnostic Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platform.

“It’s important that we can give customers the choice of finding the right solution for their needs,” said Arpit Joshipura, vice president of product management and strategy at Dell Networking. “We’ve chosen OpenDaylight as our primary orchestration platform for creating enterprise-ready SDN solutions and fulfilling the promise of SDN to our customers.”

Serious intentions
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.

Unlike the Linux Foundation, which awards different membership levels based on the members’ financial contribution alone, OpenDaylight uses developers as its currency.

Silver members have to donate between $5,000 and $20,000 based on their size, and provide at least one developer. Gold members contribute between $50,000 and $250,000, along with three developers. Meanwhile Platinum members have to spare ten developers and a cool half-a-million.

Besides Dell, who helped found the project, Platinum members include Cisco, IBM, Juniper, Microsoft, Brocade, Citrix, Ericsson and Red Hat.

“We are seeing major shifts in the industry toward greater virtualization of every element of IT. Dell was one of the few early supporters of virtualization and has continued to be at the forefront of bridging open hardware and software for its customers,” said Neela Jacques, executive director of the project. “Their increased investment in OpenDaylight is another sign that the industry is converging around open SDN and NFV as the right path toward innovation and adoption.”

As part of the agreement, Subi Krishnamurthy, executive director and CTO of Dell Networking, has been appointed to OpenDaylight’s board of directors. Distinguished Dell engineer Mohnish Anumala will join the Technical Steering Committee.

At the end of last month, OpenDaylight released Helium, the second version of its Software-Defined Networking platform, offering a brand new user interface, better clustering support and simplified installation process, along with a preview of the upcoming OpenStack features.