Three concepts - (a) network programmability by clear separation of data and control planes and (b) sharing of network infrastructure to provide multitenancy, including traffic and address isolation, in large data center networks and (c) replacing the functions that traditionally run on a specialized hardware, with the software-realizations that run on commodity servers - have gained lot of attention by both Industry and research-community over past few years. These three concepts are broadly referred as software defined networking (SDN), network virtualization (NV) and network functions virtualization (NFV). This blog focuses on SDN technology in general and how this technology can complement Network Virtualization and Network Function Virtualization.
Thomas S. Kuhn, in his highly-influential work ’The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, defines the term paradigm as “universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of researchers”. Going by this meaning, it would not be too off the mark to call Software Defined Networking (SDN) as a new networking paradigm. Referring again to Kuhn’s words, SDN is also “sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve’.
In the words of Martin Cassado, Network virtualization and SDN are two different things and somewhat incomparable. SDN is a mechanism, whereas NV is a solution. Same applies for NfV. Hence, NV and NfV can both be seen as use-cases of SDN. In addition,SDN is not a requirement for both NV and NFV, but the technologies are complementary.
As seen from the list of the authors, this blog is an effort (sometimes combined) by bunch on sincere Engineers. We hope it will be useful to somebody, someday.
Thanks!
SDN-Happennings Team
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