The old way of programming and managing the networks will give way to a more open and robust way through technologies such as SDN
By Sanjay Gupta
In our increasingly connected lives, we tend to take the network for granted. Irrespective of which network we might be using – wireless, local, remote – what matters is this: it should be on, fast and hassle-free (in terms of our switching between networks, setting them up, etc.)
A slew of upgrades and innovations, however, are needed to keep the network buzzing with data, voice or video. The changes are necessary to take care of the growing load of traffic on networks and to keep TCP/IP (the networking protocol of the Internet and most other networks) from reaching a break point. (It has been reported time and again that the Internet needs to be overhauled if it is to continue to serve the flood of connected devices – 15 billion by 2015 as per an estimate.)
Among the hottest acronyms doing the round in networking is SDN, which stands for software-defined networking. As the name suggests, it allows admins to program and control the network without requiring access to the network’s hardware devices. According to Wikipedia, the SDN movement had its beginning in research done around 2005 at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.
It is believed that the old way of programming and managing the networks, in which several proprietary protocols and boxes add to the overall complexity, will give way to a more open and robust way through technologies such as SDN.
Another development that is taking place alongside SDN is an open-source protocol for remotely managing networking equipment called OpenFlow. Both SDN and OpenFlow are managed and propagated by a user-driven organization called Open Networking Foundation (members include Brocade, Cisco, Ericsson, Facebook, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft and several others).
Given that the early adopters of SDN are large cloud companies such as Google and Facebook, it is likely that SDN adoption will accelerate as more and more workloads shift to the cloud.
According to market researcher IDC, the SDN ecosystem will reach a market size of $3.7 billion by 2016, representing as much as 35% of the Ethernet switching market (up from virtually nothing in 2012).
However, a Forrester report cautions that for SDN’s full value to be realized, organizations will need a large upfront investment in standardizing processes and infrastructure as well as changes to organizational structures, skills and sourcing. Networking teams first need to master virtualization before they are able to take on and benefit from SDN.
Having said that, there seems hardly any doubt that the future of networking, just as in the case of computing and mobile phones, is going to be defined by software.
– Sanjay Gupta
Editor, Express Computer
