Last week I attended a seminar about SDN (Software Defined Networking) and SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) and I met some high profile people from high profile companies. It seems this topic will be hot in coming years and many manufacturers and providers are coming in to this road. The good news is that there are some standards like OpenFlow managed and maintained by Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and OpenStack that will help in orchestration and inter-operatability to the benefit of customers.
Although, there are some different ideas about the approaches to SDN; for example VMware likes to implement SDN in an all-software solution (NSX) , while Cisco (and other device manufacturers) apparently prefers hardware implemented devices which support SDN. For this latter one, imagine that you have a SDN-enabled switch with some API’s that you can program it to perform in your desired way. That’s cool! Maybe, somethings like load balancing or geofencing can be implemented on the fly by using these APIs in a networking appliance!
For someone with hardware background like myself, this hardware approach seems more attractive and I’m thrilled how it goes. As a matter of fact, a while ago I was thinking: if we can have a tiny device doing a lot of things that can be programmed by developers (I meant Smartphone), why we don’t do the same with more advanced equipments like networking devices?  And now it’s coming to the reality! Smart switch or router! combining them with Virtualization and Cloud and on-demand services, customers can implement interesting functionalities which are more cost effective and agile. HP networking was talking about HP SDN App Store! You see! I’m not an advocate of HP but as a result of this, maybe we see a revolution in networking area!

Related articles

• Keeping an eye on software-defined networking: what will it break, and how will it perform? (gigaom.com)
• Software-Defined Networking the Way Forward, Says Facebook Exec (business2community.com)