SDN market forecast in 2014: OpenFlow/Open vSwitch explosion

SDN is undoubtedly the most popular keyword in the network field in 2013, but more is the concept hype. Many vendors have published their own SDN products and strategies, however, only a few released products are commercially available. In 2014, the SDN technology will make a great leap, and more products will be deployed and ready. By interviewing several industry analysts and discussing the SDN market forecast for 2014, we generally think that SDN will stride forward.

1. More OpenFlow devices available

Although SDN hotspots move from OpenFlow to other technologies, more and more chip enterprises will provide SDN support in 2014, and more OpenFlow-friendly devices will emerge, let early deployers start to consider using this technology in new and network update projects, and expect early adopters to experience the charm of SDN when creating or upgrading networks.

"OpenFlow may bring us some real progress and we will see its development in terms of functionality and supply," said an expert, "We will see more product chips and OEMs and deploy them more widely in their product portfolios."

Some experts said that Openflow will be deployed in some campus networks in 2014. Currently, Openflow switches are mainly for data centers, but vendors such as HP have begun to launch Openflow switches for campus networks.

2. Open vSwitch 2.0 promotes Openflow applications

In the fall of 2013, Open vSwitch 2.0 was launched, introducing multi-threaded features to better support Open-source vswitches. The new version also improves scalability and promotes OpenFlow applications.

"A lot of Open vSwitch deployment has been striving to speed up instance creation-that is, the speed at which you create a new environment. This is only a problem for the largest deployment, but it makes people resist this technology, "experts said." The deployment of Open vSwitch is limited by a single thread, A single thread needs to handle the activation of all new features."

The improved scalability of Open vSwitch 2.0 will affect many SDN vendors who use it as an OpenFlow proxy on the switch or overwrite the endpoints in the technology. These suppliers include high-profile vendors such as VMware and some startups such as Midokura and Pica8.

In 3.2014, is the data center overlay Method challenged?

In 2013, SDN received sufficient impetus in the overlay mode. VMware, Nuage Networks, juniper, Midokura, and other vendors all launched related overlay products and solutions. These solutions solve the problem of orchestrating and automating connections and network services in a highly virtualized environment. However, many data center operators may find that this overlay method alone will face challenges in 2014.

"Under some circumstances, overlay will be limited by the underlying network mechanism," said an expert. Indeed, the Implementation Effect of overlay is affected by the underlying network quality and increases the complexity of the network architecture, reduces data processing performance. "The reality is that we still need to manage physical networks. For the overlay method, we first need to do easy things, and then we need to transition to more complex things, because we have equipment and capital budgets to do this ."

Another expert said that the data center operator hoped to dynamically configure and manage traffic on the physical network and bind such management and control to the application layer orchestration. "In an environment like this, people feel that basic infrastructure orchestration or automation is just enough," he explained. Do you want to enable the new server? We are very good at doing this. Do you want to enable the complete Web environment with authentication? We will need a lot of manual work ."