Cisco Fellow On Possible Threat To Cisco Of OpenFlow: 'Folks Get This'

Software-defined networking, an emerging technology that moves intelligence out of switches and routers to a software controller, is seen as a potential threat to networking vendors, particularly market leader Cisco Systems. A Cisco fellow speaking at an SDN conference this week said the company is aware of the situation and is preparing to deal with it.

"Folks get this and how to react to it is what’s being formulated right now,” said David Meyer, prefacing his remarks as his own and not an official Cisco statement. He made the remarks responding to a question from the audience at the Open Networking Summit held at Stanford University.

Software-defined networking is a new technology in which server-based controller software maintains all the rules for the network and sends the appropriate instructions to each router or switch. This is a departure from the architecture of an Ethernet or TCP/IP network where the intelligence is based in the network hardware to route packets, give priority to some traffic over others, perform a security screen and other functions. Software-defined networking is evolving in concert with the development of the OpenFlow networking standard, a research project led by Stanford.

As sister publication InformationWeek reported Monday, OpenFlow-based networking would enable enterprises to replace high-end switches with lower-cost, commodity switches, which could be 70% cheaper than high-end switches such as Cisco’s.

"I think the people at Cisco are well aware of this phenomenon," said Meyer. "It’s very obvious to everyone that something’s going on here, and the question is how to react to it in a way that everybody can live with. When you have a big company like Cisco, you’ve got to socialize those kinds of things." Meyer added that he was pushing people inside Cisco "to start thinking about it."

Software-defined networking based on OpenFlow is driven by the need to design networks that match the dynamic nature of virtualized servers. In a virtualized environment, virtual machines (VMs) can be created quickly and VM workloads can be moved around from one physical server to another as needs dictate. However, existing networks can limit that flexibility based on the configuration of each router or switch.

In the same way that server virtualization abstracts the operating system and the VM from the physical server, OpenFlow-based SDN abstracts the network "control plane" from the physical network hardware, says Stanford’s Guru Parulkar, chair of the first-ever Open Networking Summit. The control plane is the set of instructions that direct how packets are managed on the network.

While server and storage virtualization has enabled more automated development of new IT services and greater efficiency, the network interfaces are comparatively "pretty old and archaic," says Parulkar. "With OpenFlow and SDN, the promise is that the networking interface will also mature to the point that you can use it in a plug-and-play way so that when you are provisioning an application or a service ... they are able to create a virtual network of their own specification," he says.

Cisco rival HP, as well as startup Big Switch Networks, were also at the conference touting their research and product development in SDN/OpenFlow. Charles Clark, research director in HP’s Networking business, touts the idea of a hybrid switch that would support OpenFlow as well as existing network switch architecture.

Clark, who also specifically addressed campus LANs as distinct from data center LANs, said hybrid switches would be needed because the transition from traditional networks to OpenFlow networks will be a long one. "Campus LAN network administrators won’t tolerate a forklift upgrade; they aren’t going to replace all of their equipment," Clark says. "Fortunately, we can evolve and move towards an SDN technology ... through an incremental plan."

While OpenFlow/SDN is nascent technology, interest is strong, says Parulkar. More than 600 people applied to attend the Stanford summit, but there was room for only 350. They were planning to hold the second annual summit a year from now but, because of demand, may hold the next summit sooner, perhaps in April 2012.

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