SDN development of the road who have the final say?

SDN: Who will lead

So far, SDN is still at an early stage of development. There are many opinions on the SDN definition. Not only have all the major manufacturers have released their own SDN strategy, there are many different solutions, the market has begun to appear part of the manufacturers of its own behavior.

Although SDN has a good commitment, there are still many problems to be solved in terms of implementation, standardization, size and security strategy. Now on the market not only supports SDN switch more and more, but also more and more manufacturers began to get involved in the field of controller. During the discussion, Ed Chapman, vice president of business development and alliances at Arista Networks, expressed concern about the current development of SDNs: "While implementing SDN, we may face a wide variety of protocols and we will choose which controller to use ,this is a problem."

Kash Shaikh, HP's director of product and technology marketing, also believes there are many challenges ahead, and even some vendors are deliberately creating chaos because they do not have good solutions and are lagging behind in competition or proprietary solutions.

In a keynote speech, Rick Bauer, Managing Director of ONF Technology, encouraged users to use their actions to accelerate and influence the development of SDN: Users can influence their adoption of SDN / OpenFlow technologies and enhance interoperability through their own product purchases Sexuality and openness.

Rick Bauer, Managing Director, Open Network Foundation (ONF) Technology

Founded in March 2011, ONF is committed to driving SDN growth, and although young, its members have grown rapidly from 23 start-ups to more than 90 companies. Among them, board members include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Verizon, Deutsche Telecom, NTT, Microsoft and Goldman Sachs, covering a wide range of end users. Unlike many standard organizations that are simply vendor-specific specifications, ONF's organization is designed to ensure that users and operators have a strong voice in the standard-setting process. According to Rick Bauer, standards should be set by the people closest to the application, with openness and interoperability at the core. He also called for more agencies to join ONF.

The value of SDN

Few people use the new technology directly in their production network. As in the past, any new hardware and software deployment, the first will be used in the test environment. SDN will be the case. Rick Bauer thinks users are now the time to set up a test environment. Dustin Kehoe, associate director of telecom research at IDCANZ, said that SDN will have a major impact on the data center network market in the first place. He provided IDC forecast data show that by 2016 Asia Pacific data center Ethernet switch market will reach 2 billion US dollars, of which more than 35% of SDN products will have sales of more than 750 million US dollars.

SDN moves the intelligence of the network from hardware to software, enabling users to add new functionality to the network without having to update existing hardware. This simplifies and consolidates control functions, making network hardware devices more reliable and helping to reduce equipment acquisition and operational costs. After separating the control plane from the data plane, vendors can independently develop the control plane and integrate with ASICs, commercial chips, or server technologies.

At present, the well-known SDN case is Google. In fact, industry players, cloud service providers and carriers can all benefit from SDN. For enterprises, common SDN applications include virtual machine migration, distributed campus network and some ultra-low latency applications, such as providing complex unified communications services in the campus network. In cloud services, SDN can be applied to very large data centers, disaster recovery and multi-tenant environments. SDN can also help operators provide on-demand network services, traffic optimization and self-deployed content distribution networks. There are real examples of implementing SDN on the ONF website. Rick Bauer attributes the value of SDN to traffic optimization, self-deployment, programmable networking, network control and scaling, and a unified cloud API.

SDN is a holistic architecture, and OpenFlow is seen as a basic SDN protocol. ONF is responsible for defining and maintaining the OpenFlow protocol and other related standards. ONF has released four versions of the OpenFlow switch specification, as well as OF-Config protocol 1.0 and 1.11. ONF has just set up a security working group, which has seven working groups before, including the architecture, configuration management, scalability, testing and interoperability. Rick Bauer, the North-to-North API that is gaining traction recently, said: "The Technical Working Group is developing guidelines for the North-to-North API and will introduce an open-source reference API from which vendors can develop their own APIs. ONF this year will also introduce test plans to validate these APIs.