Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Software defined networking (SDN) is one of the most exciting developments we have seen in the field of packet communications since its inception. The basic idea is to decouple the system that makes decisions about where packets are sent (i.e. the control plane) from the systems responsible for forwarding traffic to their destination (the data plane). The work of bringing this idea to fruition is being driven by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a nonprofit trade organization founded by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo!.

The recent Microsoft Lync Conference in Las Vegas drove home the important point that there's more to software defined networking (SDN) than the hope of a cheaper router. Spearheaded by Pascal Menezes, Principal Program Manager in the Skype and Lync Strategic Relations and Solutions group at Microsoft and Manfred Arndt, Distinguished Technologist at HP (both companies are board level founders of the UCI Forum), the program featured a number of sessions dealing with the various impacts of SDN on the UC user experience (UX).

We all know that virtualization and cloud are big for today's IT teams. A Brocade/Vanson-Bourne survey, completed in June 2013 showed that, on average, 50 percent of enterprise software is already deployed in a virtualized environment and in two years 55 percent of organizations will have more than 80 percent of their applications virtualized. In the data center, not only have the servers and storage been virtualized, but the networks and network services are also becoming virtual, accelerated by Software Defined Networking (SDN).

An open-source thin switching platform has been released by Mountain View, California-based Big Switch Networks, which will speed up the adoption of the OpenFlow communications protocol and software-defined networking.