Openflow support has been available for the 5900 Comware7 devices since late 2013, but now it has arrived on the first Comware5 device as well !

The 5500 series with R2221 are the first series to receive Openflow support. Some other Comware5 devices will probably get the Openflow support as well, so we’ll see in the next weeks …

This is the direct link to the release notes PDF document:

http://h20564.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/kb/docDisplay/?docId=c04078970

And the download link for the 5500 firmware:

http://h20564.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/public/kb/docDisplay/?docId=c04078970

I have not seen specific docs about which Openflow features would be hardware/software based, so hopefully more details will be available soon.

Release notes do specify that Openflow cannot be combined with IRF at this point, so that kind of restricts it at this point.