SDN 101

A brief introduction to Software-Defined Networking

Hi I am Jesper Eriksson from NoviFlow. I'm here today to talk about Software Defined Networking or SDN.
What is SDN? SDN stands for Software Defined Networking and is a major transformation of the computer networking industry taking place right now. SDN takes the monolithic network devices of today and opens them up into three horizontal Layers:
• At the bottom is the Infrastructure layer, commonly called the data plane, where the data packets are processed by network devices. The Infrastructure layer consists of network devices such as physical or virtual switches, routers and network appliances such as NATs, firewalls and load balancers.
• In the middle is the Control Layer which provides an end to end view or abstraction of the network to the Application Layer. The Control Layer is realized in a Controller, which may communicate with 100s or 1,000's of network devices and which provides an application programming interface (API) northbound towards the Application Layer.
• At the top is the Application Layer where applications define the behavior of the Infrastructure Layer through interacting with the Controller's northbound API. An application may be a Layer 3 routing protocol like OSPF or more likely something much more interesting.
OpenFlow has emerged as the de facto industry standard for the controller communicating with the network devices. It provides for a common language to program the network devices in the infrastructure layer. More importantly, the OpenFlow protocol sets the boundaries the capabilities of the overall system
This horizontal layering of systems is not a new phenomenon. Computers were originally sold as monolithic machines with hardware, OS and applications all from a single vendor. Other examples are from the telecommunications industry, where horizontal layering has taken place at multiple levels: Layering of the GSM mobile system into access and core; Layering of MSC into media gateways and soft switches; Layering of network node functionality into commodity computers, OS and applications;
Based on the experiences from these other industries, the benefits of SDN are significant for everyone:
• Open systems will create more competition
• We will see more and faster innovation which will lead to new and exciting services
• Centralized software control will provide for higher network efficiencies and automation
This video is brought to you by NoviFlow and ReliableSDN