The Future Of The Network Is Software Defined

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).

Anyone For ‘Hardware Defined Networking’?

Networking Highlights Q2 2012

• The total market was worth $196 billion in the year to the end of June
• Ericsson led the Service Provider market with a 14.6% share ($20.0 billion)
• NSN was in second place with 13.3% share ($18.1 billion)
• Cisco led the Enterprise/Consumer area with a 47.2% share ($28.3 billion)
• Avaya was in second place with a 6.1% share ($3.7 billion)
• Service Provider network revenues were down 12% in the quarter to $30.5 billion and down 12% for the year to $136 billion
• Enterprise/Consumer network revenues were up 3% in the year to $60 billion and level at $14.6 billion for the quarter
• Total profits for the year were down 2% to $11.4 billion, but up 23% to $2.5 billion in the quarter
• Service Provider network profits were up 6% to $919 million in the quarter, down 22% to $4.8 billion for the year
• Quarterly Enterprise/Consumer network profits were up 36% to $1.6 billion and up 20% to $6.7 billion for the year