We’re very pleased that Pim has agreed to let us republish this article on Software Defined Networking, previously published by the METISfiles.
Last week we attended the NetEvents EMEA Press and Analyst Summit. Part of the 2-day program was a debate session on Software Defined Networks (SDN) with panellists from Gartner, IDC, IBM, Dell, HP, Extreme Networks, Enterasys and yours truly. The debate centred on the question who is first to ride the SDN revolution, the Enterprise, the Cloud Data Centre, or the Service Provider (and where is it taking them)?
What is SDN?
SDN is about separating the network router and switch data plane (hardware that does packet forwarding) from the control plane (logic that controls packet forwarding). In SDN the control path decisions are taken out of the switch and managed by software on a centralised server. In other words, SDN is about providing a programmable interface into the infrastructure to modify the network infrastructure behaviour and delegate the capability of modifying that to other IT systems. The OpenFlow protocol, which the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is standardizing, is part of SDN and is used to communicate between an external OpenFlow controller and OpenFlow enabled switches (see Figure below).
Filed under: Infrastructure, Networks, SDN | Tagged: Adara Networks, Amazon, Big Switch, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Enterasys, enterprise-it, Extreme, Facebook, Google, HP, Huawei, IBM, Juniper, Microsoft, network router, Nicira, ONF, OpenFlow, OpenStack, Parallels, SDN, Vello Systems, virtualization, Vmware | 2 Comments »
Martin Hingley's Blog 