Software Defined Networking

[SMN]

Hi all,

What are peoples thoughts on SDN/OpenFlow? I am trying to get my head around it and why, other than cost and to "stick it to the big boys", anyone would implement this?

Basically, from cursory research, you have an SDN/openflow controller which communicates and controls commodity hardware ("merchant silicion") using the openflow protocol. This hardware is much cheaper, but doesnt have custom ASIC's and thus (assumingly) cannot run the advanced routing protocols hence the need for controllers.

Is anyone using OpenFlow at the moment or have any more insight into how it works? I watched an "Engineers unplugged" vid from Cisco (link here) and they discussed a benefit of SDN being that it can predict that a certain path is busy, and thus use a different path - but we have been using routing protocols to do similar operations to this for years now.

I initially got into this looking at how we can monitor OpenFlow/SDDC, but now i need to know moaaaar

Thx,
Sam

 

[SMN]

Reading on from this article: http://readwrite.com/2013/04/23/software-defined-networking-sdn

It seems I was confused earlier. This isnt an "Controller" as such, basically each application is a controller, and it tells the network how to act. i.e. "Im going from A to B, i need to go via these switches" for example.

As the article says, its like handing control of the traffic lights in a city to every driver in the city. Risky, but possibly very neat.