Open Network Featured Article

There are a lot of changes coming down the pike in this New Year, but one of the most significant will be in the area of SDN, or software defined networking. For those unfamiliar with it, SDN is an approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to basically manage network services through an abstraction of higher-level functionality. Simply put, this is done by decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane).

With this growth in mind, industry publication RCR Wireless (News - Alert) News called on Carolyn Raab, VP of Product Management at Corsa, to take a deeper dive into what we can expect. Her insights into what’s coming to this arena are worth a second look:

FPGAs Will Play a Much Larger Role in Data Centers: Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are going to grow in prominence. “Network engineers need flexible, open hardware to create policy-driven, self-tuning networks. Hardware vendors need design cycles that can keep pace with network innovations and changes demanded by the network engineers,” Raab says. “The old way of waiting for fixed function ASICs is too much waiting for too rigid a product. Field programmable gate arrays have advanced to the point where their underlying silicon process technology is in lockstep with ASICs while users benefit from the combined volume of all other users of the same platform.”

SDN Will Emerge from the Hype Cycle, Based on Real Deployments: “There are now confirmed scheduled deployments of SDN in service providers, Internet exchanges, Internet service providers and data centers,” Raab notes. “What’s common to all of them is the top to bottom solution in an integration of SDN orchestration, control and data plane elements.” With the missing pieces available and a full offering of interworking parts, real deployments will accelerate beyond just the early, most sophisticated users and find themselves in a broad base of networks of different shapes and sizes, she adds.

Reprogrammable Networks and Real Time Analytics Will Be Hot Topics for 2016: “The ability to reprogram the network on the fly is showing up and getting lots of interest from service providers, broadcasters, municipalities and enterprises, to name a few,” Raab says. “Look for much discussion and some innovative deployments of reprogrammable networks.”

Raab also believes that 100G SDN will begin to ramp aggressively because both the data drivers and the underlying network have reached a critical junction. “Traffic growth on the network continues to put pressure on network infrastructure, and will be even more significant with 100G storage deploying to add to the massive growth in video and ‘Internet of Things’ generated traffic,” she says.

In short, fasten your seatbelt: It’s going to be a wild ride.