Breaking through the innovative idea of traditional network pattern to accelerate SDN (1)

SDN has suddenly stirred up an uproar in the industry. From its initial proposal to its current concern, it has gone through many years of hard work. What caused the industry to be so concerned with SDN networks should we start with the basic network. The original network was designed to better interact with information and improve business development. However, in today's network environment, it is no longer able to meet the rapid development of business. Therefore, the emergence of SDN is like putting a stone into the calm water, which quickly caused instability.

The emergence of cloud computing, virtual networks, and big data has accelerated the pace of network architecture transformation. In the past, people focused more on vswitches, routers, security devices, and infrastructure. However, with the acceleration of wireless networks and Virtualization Technologies, the original network architecture is facing new challenges. How to streamline the network architecture and improve service quality has become a new topic in the industry.

When talking about the basic network architecture, we have to mention three-layer networks. As a new technical network, SDN focuses on two or three-layer networks and changes these basic networks, it will directly change the original network architecture system and bring it a new look. This not only frees the original it o & M personnel, but also makes device operations more concise and flexible.

What is SDN?

H3C believes that the SDN principle is very simple to understand. As a new network architecture, SDN Software Defined network emphasizes two capabilities.

1. Control forwarding separation: a network architecture with tight coupling of traditional network devices is split into two planes: Control and forwarding. At the same time, a centralized controller is added to the control plane for overall scheduling, and commands and logic are sent back to the data forwarding plane of the hardware (vro or vswitch.

2. Open APIs and Software Definition: Implements centralized management of the entire network by programming open APIs Based on SDN technology, you do not need to manage devices on each vro or vswitch.

The Controller/Agent architecture model is currently the most popular and well-known in the industry. It introduces an SDN Controller based on the mechanism controlled by traditional devices. The underlying devices only need to be responsible for traffic forwarding, among them, there is a valuable interface protocol-OpenFlow, which has evolved a lot from HP's cooperation with Stanford's Ethane project to the latest version 1.3.1 ,. Of course, in addition to the ONF Organization, many organizations in the industry are conducting research on SDN standards. For example, IETF launches its own standard protocol I2RS, you can open an interface based on the existing routing and forwarding protocols of a device, and allow your applications to control the routing policies and status of the device, so as to achieve the purpose of the software-defined network.