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OPINION
The future is soft,
the future is…
SDN is gaining ground in the data centre. Cliff Grossner,
Ph.D., Research Director at IHS Technology explains why
DC SDN will cross the chasm in 2016
Crossing the chasm to SDN
reality...
SDN captured our attention because of its potential
to automate the data centre network using network
programmability. The need for automation is driven by
changes in application architectures and the increased
adoption of off-premise cloud services. Applications
no longer consume bandwidth predictably, it’s
more dynamic and unpredictable and so, traditional
methods to provide users with a quality experience,
such as statically assigned priorities (QoS) are no
longer effective. The network must now be capable
of identifying individual application traffic flows and
adjusting priorities to match the nature of that traffic
within a resource-constrained world.
SDN drives a new high-level architecture for networks
and applications in the data centre. It enables
integration of the network with orchestration platforms
for automation of the entire data centre across its
three essential elements of compute, storage, and
the network. SDN also enables coordination between
applications and the network, something currently
missing.
New Data Centre architecture for increased
automation
For those vendors that understand the role of software
in driving innovation, SDN brings opportunity: for
those vendors that have relied on hardware-driven
innovation for competitive differentiation it will
cause disruption. The biggest change for incumbent
networking vendors may occur because the door is
now open for software developers to create their own
modifications and applications to switch software. The
time frame for testing new ideas is reduced to days or
weeks, rather than months and years. The opportunity
for a new wave of innovation in networking is upon us
and there will be many new market entrants selling
applications that can run directly on switch hardware
or be easily integrated into SDN controllers.
This disaggregation of hardware from software
enabled by white-box bare metal switches is not new
and is standard practice in the server world. But in the
network it finally assigns separate values to network
hardware and software, which until now has been a
meaningless exercise because of the bundled nature
of switch sales. We expect that this move will apply
downward pressure on switch hardware margin; there
is no reason to expect that the long-term prospect
for switch hardware margins will be different from
that of servers. To escape margin pressure, hardware
manufacturers will have to add new features such as
packet pipeline processing capabilities that are built
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