One of the first software-defined networking (SDN) languages called Openflow was created about ten years ago and was demonstrated at an Interop tradeshow from some Opengear equipment I donated. I was at a trade show and slowly but surely, people began to congregate around our table, realizing what I had recognized as a game-changing idea: An independent management plane. With so much traffic on a typical production network, it’s not feasible to use that same network to make configuration changes, software updates or do any of the other fine-tuning to devices. Ideally, those changes should be made through the device’s serial port – independent from the network itself.