The latest topic in enterprise networking is software-defined networks (SDNs), which increase the intelligence of the core network making it more receptive to overall IT and business demands of an enterprise. It is essentially a new approach to providing networks with more real-time intelligence, deep application integration and high levels of automation to prepare networking technology for rigorous demands of the cloud era.
In this post we will focus on various aspects of SDN, market forecasts, the ‘OpenFlow’ connection and Calsoft’s value proposition towards SDN innovation.
SDN – A
Greener Pasteur?
Doyle Research and GigaOM Research predict that the enterprise SDN market (as defined by this report) will reach $320 million in 2014 and grow to $2.45 billion by 2018. North America continues to be the biggest market for SDN
solutions.
Plexxi, Lightspeed Venture Partners and SDNCentral recently came up with a research report on SDN market sizing that highlights a total
of 225 companies registered as SDN companies’ in 2013 vis-à-vis 0 which was the number in 2009. The report also cites that the venture capital funding of SDN-related companies rose from $10 million in 2007 to $454 million in 2012.
Initial SDN adoption will be driven by large, hyperscale networks and data centers in the cloud service provider’s
infrastructure. Growth in enterprise adoption of private cloud data centers will increase the need to change the underlying network to SDN technology.
The SDN-OpenFlow Connection
The technology most often associated with SDN is OpenFlow. OpenFlow is an example of SDN, but it is not SDN by itself. It’s a protocol that aims to separate the intelligence required to route a packet from the act of moving a packet– can commoditize the switches and routers. It is believed to have a big impact on the networking vendors such as Cisco, Arista and Juniper.
Interestingly, Noviflow, a SDN solutions and services firm, backs the OpenFlow innovation and anticipates a world when customers can buy a range of switches from different vendors and expect them to work because they are all OpenFlow compliant.
Calsoft and SDN
Calsoft has contributed to SDN by way of Open vSwitch component development and testing. Some of the work that experts at Calsoft do in SDN includes:
- OVS Integration with different hypervisors platform
- Provided patches for issues or enhancement related to OVS utilities, Python scripts, and
- AUTOTEST checks Developed Wireshark dissector plugin for tunneling protocol
- Developed internal infrastructure for Wireshark git repository for dissector plugins
- Developed OVS utilities Linux manual pages
