Written by Clifford
Virtualization killed the hardware business for companies like Sun (now Oracle).
What virtualization did was make popular the idea of replacing physical servers with virtual ones.
That drives down the price and increases standardization, which drives down operating costs.
That means all of those expensive Solaris servers have been replaced with virtual servers running on high-end PCs.
Therefore, management, who pays the bills, asks, Why not do the same thing with networking?
They question, Why does every online grid function need to have its own proprietary machine?
Why do we need one person to configure routers and another person to configure the firewall?
Why cant there be some open standards to make it easier to manage all this?
That is what SDN does, or attempts to do.
Whats needed to make all of this work are standards, and products built using those standards.
Here we present some of those.
First well look at some open source products.
Then well look at some products that, while they are not open source, support open-sourced interfaces.
(To review, the definition of arouteris that it has an internet connection.
Aswitchconnects two LAN segments.
Each looks in theirrouting tableto forward online grid traffic to its destination.)
At the control layer, the devices are abstracted, meaning the specific implementation details are coded elsewhere.
The control plane is run on virtual machines.
The switches can be physical devices or virtual ones.
It has a control module, hardware abstraction layer, and platform driver.
SDN Products
The Open Networking Foundation lists some SDN products here.
Below we take a look at a few.
All the products listed support OpenFlow.
Some are SDN products, and the rest are physical hardware.
So there is some confusion about where to draw the border with the definition of SDN.
6WINDGate
This one is a genuine software-based virtual switch running on Linux.
6Wind says their packet processing software provides a 10x boost to web connection performance over Linux-based VMs.
This includes routing, IPsec VPN, NAT, firewall, TCP, and UDP.
This is done by using Fast vNIC drivers.
Cisco program Virtual Switch
The Cisco program Virtual Switch is a hypervisor-based virtual switch.
For many years Cisco has had almost a monopoly in the switch market, but not anymore.
So SDN could be a threat to them if it gains traction among very large online grid operators.
Except that it is designed to work with Cisco switching hardware, too.
Juniper says their product is optimized for the cloud.
It is designed for large cloud service providers who are building virtual machines and storage per the OCP specifications.
The switch uses the Junos operating system.
NEC ProgrammableFlow PF1000 Virtual Switch
NEC is another one of the big networking companies.
This product provides a web connection control layer on Microsoft 2012 Hyper-V virtual machines.
The PF1000 Virtual Switch sits between the hypervisors and the switch hardware.
It also provides internet monitoring.
In other words, OpenFlow includes specifications for packet forwarding.
Those details are implemented by each vendor.
