IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) cloud applications require relia-
ble, fault-tolerant networks, supporting real-time guarantees and eventually allowing interaction with other applications already existing in the datacenters.
The Software Defined Networks (SDN) paradigm is especially suited for the
management of the network cloud because of its fine-grained admission control and management flexibility provided by the centralized resource management. This paper presents an experimental assessment of two existing open-source SDN switch platforms, in order to evaluate its suitability to support IIoT applications. Tests include assessment of fault-tolerant capabilities, computation requirements, session setup times and QoS capabilities of the SDN switches.