SDN: Technology to cut costs, speed new services
Software-defined networking (SDN) is defined by a decoupling of the control and packet-forwarding planes in a network, an architecture that can slash operational costs and speed the time it takes to make changes or provision new services.
Since all the intelligence resides in software – not baked into monolithic specialty hardware – customers can replace traditional switches with commodity devices to save on capital costs. SDN also makes it possible for the network to interface with applications directly via APIs to improve security and application performance.
So what is SDN?
Traditional networks are made up of devices with integrated control and data-forwarding planes so each box needs to be configured and managed independently. Because of this, even simple changes to the network can take weeks or even months to complete because the changes have to be made to each device. This was acceptable when network changes were typically made independently from business changes.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here