SDN migration

Although both software-defined, ONIE (Open Network Install Environment, such as Cumulus Linux) and OpenFlow work on different strategies which requires carefully planning for SDN migration from traditional infrastructure.

OpenFlow focuses on centralized resource management, which implies more flexible utilization of abundant networking resources. Thus it won't help if your plan is to increase performance by managing 'limited' resources by software more precisely. Then ONIE solutions which provides more powerful network OS may be your better solution. For example, price of an ONIE switch would fall between traditional L2 and L3 products, so it's good to use ONIE if the use case is more than L2 or L2/L3 combined.