evilviper writes:
"According to industry analysts, the reduced sales of traditional switching/routing heavyweights, during this traditionally active time, is due to widespread corporate investments and trials of software defined networking (SDN) equipment, which promises to improve routing efficiency, network management, and dramatically reduce hardware costs. Industry heavyweights like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and others are already heavily invested in OpenFlow and SDN, but it seems to be taking hold on a much wider scale, and not just in ultra-massive data centers."
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday March 18 2014, @03:43AM
I've looked and looked, and I can't seem to find anything in SDN or OpenFlow that hasn't been possible for many years through well planned vlans and/or mpls. Yes, a different way to specify it, but not really a new capability.
Does it really bring nothing new to the table?
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Wednesday March 19 2014, @09:54AM
When you put it like that there's not much difference, but even the lowliest openflow switch has those abilities and has to connect to central controller before it can even do anything. It's a new baseline that is the exact opposite of the old distributed hardware paradigm. The real story though, is that SDN lays a platform for rapid innovation. I think the next ten years will see networking change quite a bit.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday March 19 2014, @08:11PM
I'm a bit at a loss still. I have always considered networks to be freely definable through configuration, though I prefer to keep it decentralized.
I can see value in finer control and a standardized configuration, certainly. I guess it's just that the marketing hype leads one to expect something more fundamental and revolutionary than that.