The future of networking will be defined by software. That was the overriding theme after the first day of the inaugural Open Networking Summit, a conference dedicated to software-defined networking (SDN)and OpenFlow, the open source API defined to enable multivendor switches and routers to be programmable.
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- The future of networking will be defined by software.
这是就职的第一天之后的首要主题Open Networking Summit, a conference dedicated to software-defined networking (SDN) andOpenFlow,开源API defined to enable multivendor switches and routers to be programmable.
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Heavy on technology and light on marketing, theOpen Networking Summitwas put together by host Stanford University -- where OpenFlow has its roots -- and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), an organization formed earlier this year to standardize OpenFlow and SDN. And it played to a sold-out crowd of engineers from Web companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo as well as service providers, systems vendors, startups and academia.
When first proposed, the organizers of the Open Networking Summit expected about 100 registered attendees and a smattering of demonstrations. What they got was 600-plus registrants and more than 25 demos.
"This is no longer a research project," said Dan Pitt, vice chairman of the summit and executive director of the ONF. "It enables customers and users to do things they could not do before."
那就是，就好像它是计算机编程的网络。开放流，或提供从物理网络到控制元件的抽象层的任何API，允许随后配置或通过软件，然后打开它进一步创新操纵网络，会议参与者说。
“价值主张......是对网络的竞争优势的目的范围内创新的能力，”马丁·卡萨多，联合创始人和启动Nicira网络的CTO，网络说virtualization公司。“一旦你分离层，他们可以独立发展。”
SDN provides abstraction at three areas of the network: distributed state, forwarding and configuration, says Scott Shenker, a founding board member of the ONF and a professor at UC Berkeley. Abstractions are key to extracting simplicity, yet networking today is mastering complexity, he says.
"The ability to master complexity is not the same as the ability to extract simplicity," Shenker says. "[SDN] is a major change in the paradigm -- logically centralized control function. This is the beginning of the software era of networking."
随着开放流/ SDN，用户可以自定义网络，当地的需求，消除不必要的功能和创建虚拟，隔离网络尼克·麦基翁在斯坦福大学电气工程和计算机科学教授说。他们还可以加快创新步伐，通过软件，而不是硬件，这将加快与高校的合作伙伴和技术转让技术交流，他说。
But there are caveats, too. OpenFlow and SDNs are只是把它研究实验室，并投入生产. OpenFlow is immature and unproven in large-scale network deployments, participants at the summit said. Scale, fault tolerance and安全have been questioned, and it could take years for the technology to manifest itself in any meaningful way in production environments.
And then there'sCisco. As the leading vendor in routers and switches, Cisco may have the most to lose from the movement to SDN. Even though Cisco is a member of the ONF and plans to put OpenFlow on its Nexus switch line, according toa Cisco official's blog，SDN可以采取的价值主张出公司的终端到终端的建筑推销的。
大卫·迈耶，思科杰出的工程师说，该公司了解到的OpenFlow / SDN的潜在影响，并正在制定它的反应。
Nonetheless, enterprises and large-scale data centers, like those that belong to Yahoo, have a need for it now, says Igor Gashinsky, principal architect at Yahoo.
“其中一个问题是拓扑发现，”他说。“路由器花30 +％的CPU周期重做拓扑发现，我们已经有这个在中央数据库！所以，我们只是编程呢！”
With a general API like OpenFlow, SDN makes the introduction of new vendor operating systems much easier, Gashinsky says. It also allows users to create plug-ins for adding features to the control plane without having to change the underlying hardware -- or to enhance the hardware without changing the control plane, he says.
"This is like the move from mainframes toLinuxon servers," Gashinsky says of SDN.