Infrastructure Virtualization Versus Converged Infrastructure

While writing about software-defined networking (SDN) and what it makes possible, I have been thinking about how its essential premise, and the premise behind infrastructure virtualization, conflicts with visions of converged infrastructure promulgated by the leading systems vendors in the information-technology (IT) industry.

According to the Wikipedia definition, converged infrastructure encompasses servers, storage, networking gear, and software for IT infrastructure management, automation, and orchestration. Accordingly, converged infrastructure leverages pooled IT resources to facilitate automated resource provisioning in support of dynamic application workloads.

Hardware Pedigrees in Software World

Leading vendors, most with more hardware than software pedigrees, have sought to offer proprietary converged-infrastructure offerings that closely integrate the hardware elements with software-based management attributes. In this regard,  we can cite vendors such as Cisco (with a storage assist from EMC or NetApp), Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Hitachi Data Systems, Oracle (though networking remains on open question there),  and, perhaps to a lesser extent, IBM.

Now, let’s think about SDN and where it ultimately leads. Cisco would like us to believe that SDN, if it leads anywhere, will eventually take us to network programmability, with a heavy emphasis on the significance of a northbound API (or APIs).  Cisco says that the means — in this case, SDN — are not as important as the desired ends, networking programmability, and many of Cisco’s enterprise customers will doubtless agree.

SDN End Games

Another SDN outcome is network virtualization, which admittedly can also be achieved through other means. But an interesting aspect of SDN’s approach to network virtualization, with its decoupling of the network’s control and data planes, is that it results in the abstracting of software-based network intelligence from the underlying hardware-based network brawn. It’s a software paradigm taken to a logical extreme, with server-based software running at the network edge controlling an abstracted pool of no-frills networking hardware.

Indeed, this is one end game for SDN, first playing out in the data centers of the major cloud service providers that guide the affairs of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), and then — at some indeterminate future point too difficult to forecast without a Ouija board and a bottle of scotch  — also at large enterprises worldwide.

Let’s elaborate further. SDN facilitates network virtualization, which in turn is harnessed and orchestrated by cloud-management software, which also manages virtualized compute and storage infrastructure. As we’ve seen already in the compute world of servers, it’s getting increasingly difficult for a vanity hardware vendor to earn a buck in a virtualized world. Many service providers have found that they can get boxes that satisfy their needs, at lower prices, directly from ODMs that often build servers for name-brand OEMs.  Storage is being virtualized, too.

Network’s Turn

And now it is the network’s turn.

In such a world, how much longer will it make sense for customers to achieve converged infrastructure from single-source vendors that equip their hardware with proprietary fripperies and hooks to facilitate lock-in? Again, we can see these trend playing out at large service providers. Some have begun buying their networking hardware off the rack from ODMs, saving not only on capital expenditures (certainly the case for servers), but also on operating expenses relating to the ongoing management of network infrastructure. It’s true that they’re trading one sort of complexity for another, pushing it up the stack and into software rather than an operational hardware, but it’s a trade-off they’re clearly willing to make, probably because they have the resources and skill sets to make it work (and pay).

Obviously that is not a recipe for everybody, certainly not for most enterprises today. But times are changing, and it isn’t inconceivable to foresee a day when the enterprise will be able to avail itself of third-party private-cloud software and management tools that will allow it to exploit a similar model of virtualized infrastructure.

Prescience Pays Off

In the big picture, as far as the established networking vendors are concerned, the ONF’s conception of SDN is about more than just OpenFlow, and even about more than network programmability. It’s about how SDN supports a model of network virtualization, in service to infrastructure virtualization, that significantly enfeebles hardware-based business models. Some of these hardware-oriented vendors will not successfully pivot to a model of virtualized infrastructure and software primacy.

On the other hand, some vendors have had the prescience to see this trend approaching on the horizon; they understand its inevitability, and they have positioned themselves better than others to survive, and perhaps even thrive, after the eventual market transition.

We’ll look at one of those vendors in a subsequent post.

SDN Focus Turns to Infrastructure

At this year’s SIGCOMM conference in Helsinki, Finland, a workshop called Hot Topics in Software-Defined Networking (HotSDN) will be held on August 13.  A number of papers will be presented as part of HotSDN’s technical program, but one has been written as a “call to arms for the SDN community.”

The paper is called: “Fabric: A Retrospective on Evolving SDN.” Its authors are Martin Casado, CTO of Nicira Networks; Teemu Koponen of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI); Scott Shenker, a co-founder of Nicira Networks (along with Casado) and also a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley; and Amin Tootoonchian, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and a visiting researcher at ICSI.

SDN Fabrics

We’ll get to their definition of fabric soon enough, but let’s set the stage properly by explaining at the outset that the paper discusses SDN’s shortcomings and proposes “how they can be overcome by adopting the insight underlying MPLS,” which is seen as helping to facilitate an era of simple network hardware and flexible network control.

In the paper’s introductory section, the authors contend that “current networks are too expensive, too complicated to manage, too prone to vendor lock-in, and too hard to change. “ They write that the SDN community has done considerable research on network architecture, but not as much on network infrastructure, an omission that they then attempt to rectify.

Network infrastructure, the paper’s authors contend, has two components: the underlying hardware, and the software that controls the overall behavior of the network. Ideally, they write, hardware should be simple, vendor-neutral, and future-proof, while the control plane should be flexible.

Infrastructure Inadequacies

As far as the authors are concerned, today’s network infrastructure doesn’t satisfy any of those criteria, with “the inadequacies in these infrastructural aspects . . .  probably more problematic than the Internet’s architectural deficiencies.” The deficiencies cannot be overcome through today’s SDN alone, but a better SDN can be built by, as mentioned above, “leveraging the insights underlying MPLS.”

And that’s where network fabrics enter the picture. The authors define a network fabric as “a contiguous and coherently controlled portion of the network infrastructure, and do not limit its meaning to current commercial fabric offerings.” Later, they refer to a network fabric as “a collection of forwarding elements whose primary purpose is packet transport. Under this definition, a network fabric does not provide more complex network services such as filtering or isolation.”

Filtering, isolation, policy, and other network services will be handled in software at the network edge, while the fabric will serve primarily as a “fast and cheap” interconnect. The authors contend that we can’t reach that objective with today’s SDN and OpenFlow.

OpenFlow’s Failings

They write that OpenFlow’s inability to “distinguish between the Host-Network interface (how hosts inform the network of requirements) and the Packet-Switch interface (how a packet identifies itself to a switch) has resulted in three problems, the first of which is that OpenFlow, in its current form, does not “fulfill the promise of simplified hardware” because the protocol requires switch hardware to support lookups of hundreds of bits.

The second problem relates to flexibility. As host requirements evolve, the paper’s authors anticipate “increased generality in the Host-Network interface,” which will mean increasing the generality in . . . “matching allowed and the actions supported” on any every switch supported by OpenFlow. The authors are concerned that “needing functionality to be present on every switch will bias the decision towards a more limited feature set, reducing OpenFlow’s generality.”

The third problem, similar to the second, is that the current implementation of OpenFlow “couples host requirements to the network core behavior.” Consequently, if there is a change in external network protocols (such as a transition from IPv4 to IPv6), the change in packet matching would necessarily extend into the network core.

Toward a New Infrastructure

Accordingly, the authors propose a network fabric that borrows heavily from MPLS, with its labels and encapsulation, and that also benefits from proposed modifications to the SDN model and to OpenFlow itself. What we get is a model that includes a network fabric as “architectural building block” within SDN. A diagram illustrating this SDN model shows a source host connecting to an ingress edge switch, which then applies MPLS-like label-based forwarding within the “fabric elements.” On the other side of the fabric, an egress edge switch ensures that packets are delivered to the destination host. The ingress and egress edge switches answer to an “edge controller,” while a “fabric controller” controls the fabric elements.

The key properties associated with the SDN fabric are separation of forwarding and separation of control. Separation of forwarding is intended to simplify the fabric forwarding elements, but also to “allow for independent evolution of fabric and edge.” As for separation of control, I quote from the paper:

While there are multiple reasons to keep the fabric and the edge’s control planes separate, the one we would like to focus on is that they are solving two different problems. The fabric is responsible for packet transport across the network, while the edge is responsible for providing more semantically rich services such as network security, isolation, and mobility. Separating the control planes allows them each to evolve separately, focusing on the specifics of the problem. Indeed, a good fabric should be able to support any number of intelligent edges (even concurrently) and vice versa.

Two OpenFlows?

As the authors then write, “if the fabric interfaces are clearly defined and standardized, then fabrics offer vendor independence and . . . limiting the function of the fabric to forwarding enables simpler switch implementations.”

The paper goes on to address the fabric-service model, fabric path setup, addressing and forwarding in the fabric, and how the edge context is mapped to the fabric (the options are address translation and encapsulation, which is the authors’ favored mechanism.)

To conclude, the authors look at fabric implications, one of which involves proposed changes to OpenFlow. The authors prescribe an “edge” version of OpenFlow, more general than the current manifestation of the protocol, and a “core” version of OpenFlow that is similar to MPLS forwarding. The authors say the current OpenFlow is an “unhappy medium,” insufficiently general for the edge and not simple enough for the core. The authors say the generic “edge version of OpenFlow should aggressively adopt the assumption that it will be processed in software, and be designed with that freedom in mind.”

Refinements to the Model

In the final analysis, the authors believe their proposal to address infrastructure as well as architecture will result in an SDN model “where the edge processing is done in software and the core in simple (network) hardware,” the latter of which would deliver the joint benefits of reduced costs and “vendor neutrality. “

The paper essentially proposes a refinement to both OpenFlow and to the SDN architectural model. We might call it SDN 2.0, though that might seem a little glib and presumptuous (at least on my part). Regardless of what we call it, it is evident that certain elements in the vanguard of the SDN community continue to work hard to deliver a new type of cloud-era networking that delivers software-based services running over a brawny but relatively simple network infrastructure.

How will the broader SDN community and established vendors in network infrastructure respond? We won’t have to wait long to find out.

Cisco’s SDN Response: Mission Accomplished, but Long Battle Ahead

In concluding my last post, I said I would write a subsequent note on whether Cisco achieved its objectives in its rejoinder to software-defined networking (SDN) at the Cisco Live conference last week in San Diego.

As the largest player in network infrastructure, Cisco’s words carry considerable weight. When Cisco talks, its customers (and the industry ecosystem) listen. As such, we witnessed extensive coverage of the company’s Cisco Open Network Environment (Cisco ONE) proclamations last week.

Really, what Cisco announced with Cisco ONE was relatively modest and wholly unsurprising. What was surprising was the broad spectrum of reactions to what was effectively a positioning statement from the networking market’s leading vendor.

Mission Accomplished . . . For Now

And that positioning statement wasn’t so much about SDN, or about the switch-control protocol OpenFlow, but about something more specific to Cisco, whose installed base of customers, especially in the enterprise, is increasingly curious about SDN. Indeed, Cisco’s response to SDN should be seen, first and foremost, as a response to its customers. One could construe it as a cynical gesture to “freeze the market,” but that would not do full justice to the rationale. Instead, let’s just say that Cisco’s customers wanted to know how their vendor of choice would respond to SDN, and Cisco was more than willing to oblige.

In that regard, it was mission accomplished. Cisco gave its enterprise customers enough reason to put off a serious dalliance with SDN, at least for the foreseeable future (which isn’t that long). But that’s all it did. I didn’t see a vision from Cisco. What I saw was an effective counterpunch — but definitely not a knockout — against a long-term threat to its core market.

Cisco achieved its objective partly by offering its own take on network programmability, replete with a heavy emphasis on APIs and northbound interfaces; but it also did it partly by bashing OpenFlow, the open  protocol that effects physical separation of the network-element control and forwarding planes.

Conflating OpenFlow and SDN

In its criticism of OpenFlow, Cisco sought to conflate the protocol with the larger SDN architecture. As I and many others have noted repeatedly, OpenFlow is not SDN;  the two are not inseparable. It is possible to deliver an SDN architecture without OpenFlow. Even when OpenFlow is included, it’s a small part of the overall picture.  SDN is more than a mechanism by which a physically separate control plane directs packet forwarding on a switch.

If you listened to Cisco last week, however, you would have gotten the distinct impression that OpenFlow and SDN are indistinguishable, and that all that’s happening in SDN is a southbound conversation from a server-based software controller and OpenFlow-capable switches. That’s not true, but the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), the custodians of SDN and OpenFlow, has left an opening that Cisco is only too happy to exploit.

The fact is, the cloud service-provider principals steering the ONF see SDN playing a much bigger role than Cisco would have you believe. OpenFlow is a starting point. It is a means to, well, another means — because SDN is an enabler, too. What SDN enables is network virtualization and network programmability, but not how Cisco would like its customers to get there.

Cisco Knows SDN More Than OpenFlow

To illustrate my point, I refer you to the relatively crude ONF SDN architectural stack showcased in a white paper, Software-Defined Networking: The New Norm for Networks. If you consult the diagram in that document, you will see that OpenFlow is the connective tissue between the controller and the switch — what ONF’s Dan Pitt has described as an “open interface to packet forwarding” — but you will also see that there are abstraction layers that reside well above OpenFlow.

If you want an ever more detailed look at a “modern” SDN architecture, you can consult a presentation given by Cisco’s David Meyer earlier this year. That presentation features physical hardware at the base, with SDN components in the middle. These SDN components include the “forwarding interface abstraction” represented by OpenFlow, a network operation system (NOS) running on a controller (server), a “nypervisor” (network hypervisor), and a global management abstraction that interfaces with the control logic of higher-layer application (control) programs.

So, Cisco clearly knows that SDN comprises more than OpenFlow, but, in its statements last week at Cisco Live, the company preferred to use the protocol as a strawman in its arguments for Cisco-centric network programmability. You can’t blame Cisco, though. It has customers to serve — and to keep in the revenue- and profit-generating fold — and an enterprise-networking franchise to protect.

Mind the Gap

But why did the ONF leave this gap for Cisco to fill? It’s partly because the ONF isn’t overly concerned with the enterprise and partly because the ONF sees OpenFlow as an open, essential precondition for the higher, richer layers of the SDN architectural model.

Without the physical separation of the control plane from the forwarding plane, after all, some of the ONF’s service-provider constituency might not have been able to break free of vendor hegemony in their networks. What’s more, they wouldn’t be able to set the stage for low-priced, ODM-manufactured networking hardware built with merchant silicon.

As you can imagine, that is not the sort of change that Cisco can get behind, much less lead. Therefore, Cisco breaks out the brickbats and goes in hot pursuit of OpenFlow, which it then portrays as deficient for the purposes of far-reaching, north-and-south network programmability.

Exiting (Not Exciting) Plumbing

Make no mistake, though. The ONF has a vision, and it extends well beyond OpenFlow. At a conference in Garmisch, Germany, earlier this year, Dan Pitt, the ONF’s executive director, offered a presentation called “A Revolution in Networking and Standards,” and made the following comments:

“I think networking is going to become an integral part of computing in a way that makes it less important, because it’s less of a problem. It’s not the black sheep any longer. And the same tools you use to create an IT computing infrastructure or virtualization, performance, and policy will flow through to the network component of that as well, without special effort.

I think enterprises are going to be exiting technology – or exiting plumbing. They are not going to care about the plumbing, whether it’s their networks or the cloud networks that increasingly meet their needs, and the cloud services. They’re going to say, here’s the function or the feature I want for my business goal, and you make it happen. And somebody worries about the plumbing, but not as many people who worry about plumbing today. And if you’ve got this virtualized view, you don’t have to look at the plumbing. . . .

The operators are gradually becoming software companies and internet companies. They are bulking up on those skills. They want to be able to add those services and features themselves instead of relying on the vendors, and doing it quickly for their customers. It gives opportunities to operators that they didn’t have before of operating more diverse services and experimenting at low cost with new services.”

No Cartwheels

Again, this is not a vision that would have John Chambers doing cartwheels across the expansive Cisco campus.

While the ONF is making plans to address the northbound interfaces that are a major element in Cisco’s network programmability, it hasn’t done so yet. Even when it does, the ONF is unlikely to standardize higher-layer APIs, at least in the near term. Instead, those APIs will be associated with the controllers that get deployed in customer networks. In other words, the ONF will let the market decide.

On that tenet, Cisco can agree with the ONF. It, too, would like the market to decide, especially since its market presence — the investments customers have made in its routers and switches, and in its protocols and management tools — towers imperiously over the meager real estate being claimed in the nascent SDN market.

With all that Cisco network infrastructure deployed in customer networks, Cisco believes it’s in a commanding position to set the terms for how the network will deliver software intelligence to programmers of applications and management systems. Theoretically, that’s true, but the challenge for Cisco will be in successfully engaging a programming constituency that isn’t its core audience. Can Cisco do it? It will be a stretch.

Do They Get It?

All the while, the ONF and its service-provider backers will be advancing and promoting the SDN model and the network virtualization and programmability that accompany it. The question for the ONF is not whether its movers and shakers understand programmers — it’s pretty clear that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo are familiar with programmers — but whether the ONF understands and cares enough about the enterprise to make that market a priority in its technology roadmap.

If the ONF leaves the enterprise to the dictates of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Cisco is likely to maintain its enterprise dominance with an approach that provides some benefits of network programmability without the need for server-based controllers.

Meanwhile, as Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation has pointed out, Cisco ONE also serves as a challenge to Cisco’s conventional networking competitors, which are devising their own answers to SDN.

But that is a different thread, and this one is too long already.

Understanding Cisco’s Relationship to SDN Market

Analysts and observers have variously applauded or denounced Cisco for its network-Cisco ONE programmability pronouncements last week.  Some pilloried the company for being tentative in its approach to SDN, contrasting the industry giant’s perceived reticence with its aggressive pursuit of previous emerging technology markets such as IP PBX, videoconferencing, and converged infrastructure (servers).

Conversely, others have lauded Cisco’s approach to SDN as far more aggressive than its lackluster reply to challenges in market segments such as application-delivery controllers (ADCs) and WAN optimization, where F5 and Riverbed, respectively, demonstrated how a tightly focused strategy and expertise above the network layer could pay off against Cisco.

Different This TIme

But I think they’ve missed a very important point about Cisco’s relationship to the emerging SDN market.  Analogies and comparisons should be handled with care. Close inspection reveals that SDN and the applications it enables represent a completely different proposition from the markets mentioned above.

Let’s break this down by examining Cisco’s aggressive pursuit of IP-based voice and video. It’s not a mystery as to why Cisco chose to charge headlong into those markets. They were opportunities for Cisco to pursue its classic market adjacencies in application-related extensions to its hegemony in routing and switching. Cisco also saw video as synergistic with its core network-infrastructure business because it generated bandwidth-intensive traffic that filled up existing pipes and required new, bigger ones.

Meanwhile, Cisco’s move into UCS servers was driven by strategic considerations. Cisco wanted the extra revenue servers provided, but it also wanted to preemptively seize the advantage over its former server partners (HP, Dell, IBM) before they decided to take the fight to Cisco. What’s more, all the aforementioned vendors confronted the challenge of continuing to grow their businesses and public-market stock prices in markets that were maturing and slowing.

Cisco’s reticence to charge into WAN optimization and ADCs also is explicable. Strategically, at the highest echelons within Cisco, the company viewed these markets as attractive, but not as essential extensions to its core business. The difficulty was not only that Cisco didn’t possess the DNA or the acumen to play in higher-layer network services — though that was definitely a problem — but also that Cisco did not perceive those markets as conferring sufficiently compelling rewards or strategic advantages to warrant the focus and resources necessary for market domination. Hence, we have F5 Networks and its ADC market leadership, though certainly F5’s razor-sharp focus and sustained execution factored heavily into the result.

To Be Continued

Now, let’s look at SDN. For Cisco, what sort of market does it represent? Is it an opportunity to extend its IP-based hegemony, like voice, video, and servers? No, not at all. Is it an adjunct market, such as ADCs and WAN optimization, that would be nice to own but isn’t seen as strategically critical or sufficiently large to move the networking giant’s stock-price needle? No, that’s not it, either.

So, what is SDN’s market relationship to Cisco?

Simply put, it is a potential existential threat, which makes it unlike IP PBXes, videoconferencing, compute hardware, ADCs, and WAN optimization. SDN is a different sort of beast, for reasons that have been covered here and elsewhere many times.  Therefore, it necessitates a different sort of response — carefully calculated, precisely measured, and thoroughly plotted. For Cisco, the ONF-sanctioned approach to SDN is not an opportunity that the networking giant can seize,  but an incipient threat to the lifeblood of its business that it must blunt and contain — and, whatever else, keep out of its enterprise redoubt.

Did Cisco achieve its objective? That’s for a subsequent post.

In Assessing SDN’s Future, Take Care in Picking Precedents

Software-defined networking (SDN) continues to generate considerable attention and commentary, with this humble corner of the Internet contributing to the hubbub. There’s always a danger, especially with new technologies, that the hype cycle will result in a scenario in which proponents will overpromise and the technologies, understandably, will underdeliver.

When that happens, disappointment ensues. Gartner calls it the “trough of disillusionment,” which often serves as the darkness before the market dawn.

Certainly many caveats have been raised as expectation moderators to SDN. These caveats often come with references to preceding technologies that didn’t quite evolve according to originator intent or market plan. Lately, in fact, some have cited the slow adoption of IPv6 as a cautionary tale for SDN.

Not Analogous

In more than one respect, however, the comparison of IPv6 comparison with SDN doesn’t fly.

As the existence of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) attests, large cloud service providers clearly perceive compelling business reasons  for the development and deployment of SDN solutions. Conversely, IPv6 was seen as something enterprises and service providers would have to do eventually as opposed to something they wanted to do.

Where the switch to IPv6 from IPv4 was driven by fear, the transition from conventional networking to software-defined networking (SDN), at least for large service providers, is being driven by the desire for business benefits and increased operational efficiency. While the purveyors of IPv6 sternly wielded a threatening stick to drive compliance, the champions of SDN at the ONF waved the carrots of network programmability and reduced operating expenditures. It was something they want, not something fear compels them to do.

Yes, I know that there always were good business reasons for enterprises and service providers to adopt IPv6, but those reasons often were articulated poorly or inadequately. Instead, fear took center stage, attempting to browbeat and threaten its audience into abject fealty.

Only Works for the Mob

Nobody likes to be threatened. Negative sales campaigns, predicated on implicit or explicit threats of impending doom, are less likely to resonate than those that are positive and inspiring. (Unless, of course, you’re running a protection racket for the mob, in which case your threats might be pretty damn effective, at least for a while.) IPv6 was all about the approach of darkening storm clouds, wheres SDN offers the promise of sunny innovation and a bright future.

As technologies and as market phenomena, IPv6 and SDN have little in common. It seems folly to cite the slow rate of adoption of IPv6 as a predictive precursor for SDN.

So, while SDN might not live up to its promise — and it will meet particularly strong headwinds in the enterprise — it will not face the same problems that confronted IPv6. They are qualitatively different technologies, and SDN will experience a market trajectory quite different from that of IPv6.

VCs Weigh SDN’s Risks and Rewards

I’ve been thinking about a month-old post that Matthew Palmer wrote on the SDNCentral website.

In his post, Palmer considers that Arista, Insieme, and Vyatta were not financed by traditional venture capitalists. He further questions to what extent venture capitalists will plow money into the SDN space. He comes to the conclusion that it is “hard to believe there will be a large number of SDN startups being funded” by VCs.

My objective here is not to challenge Palmer’s conclusion, which seem about right. Instead, I want to examine his assumptions to see whether I can add anything to the discussion.

Slow-Growth Dead Zone

For a long time, VCs have eschewed the networking market. In recent years, Arista Networks emerged as the only new Ethernet-switching vendor to crash the established vendors’ party. Arista, as Palmer points out, was funded by its founders, not by VCs, who generally perceived networking, especially the enterprise variant, as a slow-growth dead zone controlled and dominated by Cisco Systems.

Meanwhile, the VCs had unfortunate experiences in the network-access control (NAC) market, where they sought to make bets in an area that was seen as peripheral to the big vendors’ wheelhouses.

As for SDN today, Palmer thinks most of the major VCs have done their bidding, and he believes Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins will fill out the field shortly. Beyond that, he doesn’t see much action.

Freeze Frame

He comes to that conclusion partly because of Cisco’s longstanding domination of the networking market. Writing that “Cisco learned a long time ago how to freeze markets and make markets look unattractive to competitors and investors,” Palmer believes the networking giant has put “everyone on notice” with its Insieme spin-in venture.  He believes Insieme, and whatever else Cisco does in SDN, will shut the door on SDN startups that aren’t already on the market with credible products and technologies that solve customer problems.

Perhaps VCs, as they have done in the recent past, will refrain from betting against the industry giant. That said, there already has been more VC activity in SDN than we’ve seen in network infrastructure for quite some time. In that respect, SDN demonstrably is different from the networking developments that have preceded it.

It’s different in others ways, too. I know I’ve hammered the same nail repeatedly in the past, but, at the risk of obsessive redundancy, I will do so again: The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) represents a powerful customer-driven dynamic that effectively challenges the vendor-led hegemony that has typified most networking markets and associated standards bodies. The ONF is run by and for service providers. Vendors are excluded from its board of directors, and their contributions are carefully circumscribed to conform with the dictates of the board.

Formidable Power

The catch is that the ONF is all about the needs and requirements of cloud service providers. The enterprise isn’t a primary consideration, though the development of enterprise-market demand for SDN products and technologies could further the strategic interests (economies of scale, innovation, vendor support, etc.) of the service-provider community.

Cisco is a formidable power, but it can’t impose its will on the ONF. In that respect, at least in the service-provider space, SDN is different from preceding network markets, such as Ethernet switching, which were basically incremental advancements in an established market model.

Call me crazy, but I believe that market and financial analysts should begin modeling scenarios in which the growth of SDN cuts into the service-provider revenues and margins of Cisco and Juniper. This will be particularly true in the cloud-service provider (IaaS) space initially, but it is likely to grow into other areas over time.

Enterprise Bulwark

The enterprise? That’s a tougher nut for SDN, for the reason I’ve cited earlier (ONF’s lack of an enterprise mandate), and for others as well. For starters, most enterprises don’t have the resources or the motivation (business case) to move away from networking models and relationships that have served them well.  As SDN evolves over time, that situation could change. For now, though, SDN is more a curiosity for enterprises than something they are considering for wholesale adoption.

Cisco and the other established networking vendors know the enterprise is safer ground for whatever SDN strategy or counterstrategy they present. In this respect, what Palmer terms “Insieme FUD” and other similar tactics are likely to be effective in the near term (the next two years.)

I really can’t quibble with Palmer’s conclusion — as I wrote above, it feels about right — but I think the VC investments we’ve seen heretofore in SDN already suggest that it is perceived differently from the linear networking markets that have preceded it.   I also believe there’s reason to think that SDN will lead to significant disruptions to the provision of networking solutions in the service-provider space.

How far can it go in the enterprise? For now, prospects are murky, but the game is in the early stages, and much will depend on how the SDN ecosystem evolves as well as on how effective Cisco and others are at leveraging the advantages of incumbency.

Why Established Networking Vendors Aren’t Leading SDN Charge

Expressing equal parts exasperation and incredulity, Greg Ferro wonders why industry-leading networking vendors aren’t taking the innovative initiative in offering compelling strategies for software-defined networking (SDN).

The answer seems clear enough.

Although applications will be critical to the long-term commercial success of SDN, Google and the other movers and shakers that direct the affairs of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) originally were drawn to SDN because they were frustrated with the lack of responsiveness and innovation from established vendors. As a result, they devised a networking model that not only separated the control and data planes of network elements, but that also, in the word’s of Google’s Amin Vahdat, separated the “ evolution path for (network) hardware and software.”

Two Paths

Until now, those evolutionary paths have been converged and constrained inside the largely propriety boxes of networking vendors. Google and its confreres with the ONF perceived that state of affairs as the yoke of vendor oppression. The network, slow to evolve and innovate, was getting in the way of progress.  All the combustible ingredients of a cloud-service provider insurrection had cohered. Google, taking the lead in organizing the other major service providers under the rubric of the ONF, lit the fuse.

The effects of the explosion are just being felt, and the reverberations will echo for some time. The big service providers, and perhaps many smaller ones, are gravitating away from the orbit of networking’s ancien regime. The question now is whether enterprises will follow. At some point, that probably will happen, but how and when it will unfold are less clear. Enterprises, unlike the board members of the ONF, are too diverse and prolific to organize in pursuit of common interests. Accordingly, vendors are still able to set the enterprise agenda.

But enterprises will notice the benefits that SDN is capable of conferring, and the ONF’s overlords will seek to cultivate and sustain an ecosystem that can deliver parallel hardware and software innovation. Google, for example, has indicated that while it develops its own networking hardware today, it would be amenable to buying OpenFlow switches from the vendor community. Those switches, like to carry lower margins and prices than the gear sold by the major networking vendors, will probably come from ODMs using merchant silicon from Broadcom, Marvell, Fulcrum (Intel), and others.

Money’s in the Software

The major networking vendors are saying that the cleavage of the control and data planes is not a big deal, that it’s not necessary or isn’t a critical requirement for innovation and network programmability. Perhaps there is some merit to their arguments, but there’s no question that the separation of the control and data planes is not in their business interests. If some their assertions have merit, they also are self-serving.

Cisco, as we’ve discussed before, might be able to develop software, but its business model is predicated on the sale of routers and switches. Effectively, it would have to remake itself comprehensively to recast itself as a vendor of server-based controllers (software) and the applications the run on them. A proprietary hardware box, whether a server or switch, isn’t what the ONF wants.

If the ONF’s SDN vision prevails, the money is in software: server-based controllers, applications, management/orchestration frameworks, and so on. Successful vendors not only will have to be proficient at developing software; they’ll also have to be skilled at marketing and selling it. They’ll have to build their businesses around it.

This is the challenge the major networking vendors confront. It’s why they aren’t leading the SDN charge, and it also is why they are attempting to co-opt and subvert it.