Source CIO.com
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2484229/data-center/what-cios-need-to-know-about-software-defined-networking.html
From Wikipedia.com
Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to manage network services through abstraction of lower-level functionality. This is done by decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane).
I have been reading more and more lately about Software Defined Networking. Looking at the definition above it describes the ability to remove yourself from having to manage the individual switches and routers in your environment manually and being able to now do so with a single software product.
This post is different than my other blog posts as I really don't know much about SDN whatsoever. I'll be at Interop in April and they have a track defined for SDN so I plan on spending some more time looking into what this really means.
Obviously you still need the switches and routers themselves, along with the connectivity, software isn't going to magically allow you to connect to a building that isn't pre-wired.
Reading this and other articles I see vague concepts of what SDN is. And they all say what the Wikipedia definition says, is that you can manage network devices through software. To me that seems more like a management tool than virtualization. The fact that you can manage multiple vendors systems might be nice, but unless it completely removes your need to ever physically log into a device I don't see Cisco customers rushing out to buy 3-com switches to throw into their environment just because they can.
I'm excited to see what the vendors pushing SDN have to say at this conference. Network management from a central software point would be a useful tool, but I am curious how they are going to push this as the next big thing.
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ReplyDeleteGood post, Tony! Infrastructure is not my field, but I believe that independently from the technology this is a natural trend in the IT world. We expect an increasing level of automation and independence of the systems. If in the past we had to program controlling the content of each register of the computer memory (using assembly), today we can drag-and-drop full components. I believe that the abstraction level tends to be higher and the manual work tends to decrease in most of IT fields.
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Allan Rocha
Blog:
https://sites.google.com/a/allanrocha.org/ea874