[AusNOG] SDN

[Brad McGinn]

Hi All,

I thought I'd send this to the AusNOG list to see people's opinions and/or experience in the matter of SDN; in carrier land and even in enterprise land.

I assume cloud providers would be a big advocate for SDN and 'Networks with APIs' but I'd really like to get an idea of how much take up at present is in the industry.  Does SDN have a home in carrier networks?  Is it already there?  Does it work as expected?  Was it hard to setup?  Did google really get it right with openflow?

My limited knowledge in the area leads me to believe that SDN will be a big help in automated network management with integration into things like VMWare and so on, but that to me sort of assumes Data Centre networks will be the focus.  Am I reading things wrong here or will all network devices (smart or dumb) eventually be expected to take part in SDN if required; in not just DC but any kind of network; be that a network of anything, or specific networks like carriers and so on?  With big hardware vendors like cisco and Juniper facing a thing that may demote their 'smart hardware devices' into forwarding engines, do you think there'll be a change in their mantra of 'sell sell sell hardware' or will they keep pushing that?  Will they run both races for a while or do you think they'll change focus completely?

Forgive my ignorance, I'm just trying to get a handle on what the industry professionals (rather than vendors) are seeing and what they're doing with SDN, if anything at all?  I know there are many people on this list with great knowledge and exposure to cutting edge stuff in bother carrier, cloud and enterprise networks and I'm hoping to tap that knowledge for a brief time.

Any comments welcome.

Thanks all.

Brad

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