SDN IMPACT AND FUTURE
Networking industry has shown enormous interest
in SDN. SDN is expected to make the networks
programmable and easily partitionable
and virtualizable. These features are required for
cloud computing where the network infrastructure
is shared by a number of competing
entities. Also, given simplified data plane, the
forwarding elements are expected to be very
cheap standard hardware. Thus, SDN is expected
to reduce both capital expenditure and operational
expenditure for service providers, cloud
service providers, and enterprise data centers
that use lots of switches and routers.
SDN is like a tsunami that is taking over
other parts of the computing industry as well.
More and more devices are following the software
defined path with most of the logic implemented
in software over standard processors.
Thus, today we have software defined base stations,
software defined optical switches, software
defined routers, and so on.
Regardless of what happens to current approaches to SDN, it is certain that the networks
of tomorrow will be more programmable
than today. Programmability will become a common
feature of all networking hardware so that
a large number of devices can be programmed
(aka orchestrated) simultaneously. The exact
APIs that will become common will be decided
by transition strategies since billions of legacy
networking devices will need to be included in
any orchestration.
It must be pointed out that NFV and SDN
are highly complementary technologies. They are
not dependent on each other.