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FierceTelecom.com 12 11 M ay 2 0 13 M ay 2 0 13 FierceTelecom Without standards, vendors must make interoperability a priority for their SDN offerings Software-defined networking (SDN), in its purest state, seems to answer all the needs of today's application-centric service provider—particularly the ability to change quickly and efficiently and make the best use of network resources while doing it. Of course, that's in SDN's purest state. In the unsettled, still being developed state where SDN actually resides between standards bodies and vendors with their own ideas, everyone's working to define what it is and how it can help end users. Service providers, data centers and even enterprises are finding themselves in more applications-centric positions with a greater need for flexibility. The first step for a vendor trying to explain the software to a customer is defining SDN. "There are a lot of definitions of SDN [but] probably across all the definitions the one thing that [they have in] common is to have an open programmatic API between the application layer and the network control function," explained Mitchell Auster, senior advisor, portfolio architectures for Ciena. It starts with network traffic— applications, as it were--which, Auster said, is a "virtual pool of resources that can be programmed or software-defined by an SDN controller that has a view of the entire network." Ciena defines SDN as a toolkit for virtualizing the network and enabling it to be consumed by applications and allowing that to be done in an automated and orchestrated fashion rather than with human interaction, Auster said. That's not quite the way Cisco sees it. Service providers and others who see SDN as an end game to improving network operations will be disappointed because SDN is only a tool, not the entire toolkit, said Sanjeev Mervana, director of marketing at Cisco. "What we have been communicating in the industry is that this is a very good concept and it definitely helps in certain areas, however SDN is just one of the tools in a bigger basket of tools within a service provider environment," Mervana said. The key is to avoid anything proprietary, said Eric Clelland, co-founder of Cyan. "We didn't want to have another proprietary OSS environment" Clelland said. "We were selling a significant number of customers our software solution … and that all sDn Vendors Define Technology Differently By JIM B A R t hOl d became part of Blue Planet which is now our SDN platform." Cisco, too, believes in the open environment but pushes things up a notch with what it calls the Cisco Open Networking Environment (ONE) that's designed to handle tasks that go beyond those the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) has defined for SDN. "The way SDN has been defined is fantastic but it is not enough and that's why we came out with the Cisco Open Networking Environment," Mervana said. Cisco's Open Networking Environment, or ONE, like SDN, brings the intelligent network assets closer to the application world but ONE adds elements on top of the SDN function. Those elements include programming interfaces that allow service providers to extract information from the network, controllers and agents. And it includes an open source controller that supports OpenFlow and virtual overlays that simplify workload mobility movement between data centers. Cisco must be certain that it has not overstepped the most important element of SDN, vendor interoperability, because going proprietary at this stage of the game would be suicidal. "We absolutely understand that our operators would have multi-vendor involvement," Mervana said. "We will have an open source controller on top of which our customers can build applications as well as supporting OpenFlow. We will absolutely support that." OpenFlow is a communications protocol that lets software running on multiple servers shape the path of network packets through the network of switches—both packet and switched—to provide more sophisticated traffic management and, in turn, enabling SDN. "SDN is not a particular technology," Auster said. "Even though OpenFlow is associated with SDN, "The big issue in the networking industry today is that networks are hard wired in an environment where you have dynamic compute and elastic compute." Joe cumello, chief marketing officer at cyan

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