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Software Defined Networking

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new Network Architecture conceptualized by Open Networking Foundation (ONF). ONF defines SDN as “The physical separation of the network control plane from the forwarding plane, and where a control plane controls several devices".

Concept

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture that promises to be dynamic, manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable, making it ideal for the high-bandwidth, dynamic nature of today's applications. SDNs architecture decouples the network control and forwarding functions enabling the network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted for applications and network services.

The OpenFlow protocol is a foundational element for building SDN solutions. The SDN architecture is:

• Directly programmable: Network control is directly programmable because it is decoupled from forwarding functions.
• Agile: Abstracting control from forwarding lets administrators dynamically adjust network-wide traffic flow to meet changing needs.
• Centrally managed: Network intelligence is (logically) centralized in software-based SDN controllers that maintain a global view of the network, which appears to applications and policy engines as a single, logical switch.
• Programmatically configured: SDN lets network managers configure, manage, secure, and optimize network resources very quickly via dynamic, automated SDN programs, which they can write themselves because the programs do not depend on proprietary software.
• Open standards-based and vendor-neutral: When implemented through open standards, SDN simplifies network design and operation because instructions are provided by SDN controllers instead of multiple, vendor-specific devices and protocols.

Limitations of Current Networking Technologies

Meeting current market requirements is virtually impossible with traditional network architectures. Faced with flat or reduced budgets, enterprise IT departments are trying to squeeze the most from their networks using device-level management tools and manual processes. Carriers face similar challenges as demand for mobility and bandwidth explodes; profits are being eroded by escalating capital equipment costs and flat or declining revenue. Existing network architectures were not designed to meet the requirements of today’s users, enterprises, and carriers; rather network designers are constrained by the limitations of current networks, which include:

• Complexity that leads to stasis:Networking technology to date has consisted largely of discrete sets of protocols designed to connect hosts reliably over arbitrary distances, link speeds, and topologies. To meet business and technical needs over the last few decades, the industry has evolved networking protocols to deliver higher performance and reliability, broader connectivity, and more stringent security.Protocols tend to be defined in isolation, however, with each solving a specific problem and without the benefit of any fundamental abstractions. This has resulted in one of the primary limitations of today's networks: complexity. For example, to add or move any device, IT must touch multiple switches, routers, firewalls, Web authentication portals, etc. and update ACLs, VLANs, quality of services (QoS), and other protocol-based mechanisms using device-level management tools. In addition, network topology, vendor switch model, and software version all must be taken into account. Due to this complexity, today's networks are relatively static as IT seeks to minimize the risk of service disruption.The static nature of networks is in stark contrast to the dynamic nature of today's server environment, where server virtualization has greatly increased the number of hosts requiring network connectivity and fundamentally altered assumptions about the physical location of hosts. Prior to virtualization, applications resided on a single server and primarily exchanged traffic with select clients. Today, applications are distributed across multiple virtual machines (VMs), which exchange traffic flows with each other. VMs migrate to optimize and rebalance server workloads, causing the physical end points of existing flows to change (sometimes rapidly) over time. VM migration challenges many aspects of traditional networking, from addressing schemes and namespaces to the basic notion of a segmented, routing-based design.In addition to adopting virtualization technologies, many enterprises today operate an IP converged network for voice, data, and video traffic. While existing networks can provide differentiated QoS levels for different applications, the provisioning of those resources is highly manual. IT must configure each vendor's equipment separately, and adjust parameters such as network bandwidth and QoS on a per-session, per-application basis. Because of its static nature, the network cannot dynamically adapt to changing traffic, application, and user demands.

• Inconsistent policies: To implement a network-wide policy, IT may have to configure thousands of devices and mechanisms. For example, every time a new virtual machine is brought up, it can take hours, in some cases days, for IT to reconfigure ACLs across the entire network. The complexity of today's networks makes it very difficult for IT to apply a consistent set of access, security, QoS, and other policies to increasingly mobile users, which leaves the enterprise vulnerable to security breaches, non-compliance with regulations, and other negative consequences.

• Inability to scale: As demands on the data center rapidly grow, so too must the network grow. However, the network becomes vastly more complex with the addition of hundreds or thousands of network devices that must be configured and managed. IT has also relied on link oversubscription to scale the network, based on predictable traffic patterns; however, in today's virtualized data centers, traffic patterns are incredibly dynamic and therefore unpredictable.Mega-operators, such as Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook, face even more daunting scalability challenges. These service providers employ large-scale parallel processing algorithms and associated datasets across their entire computing pool. As the scope of end-user applications increases (for example, crawling and indexing the entire world wide web to instantly return search results to users), the number of computing elements explodes and data-set exchanges among compute nodes can reach petabytes. These companies need so-called hyperscale networks that can provide high-performance, low-cost connectivity among hundreds of thousands—potentially millions—of physical servers. Such scaling cannot be done with manual configuration.To stay competitive, carriers must deliver ever-higher value, better-differentiated services to customers. Multi-tenancy further complicates their task, as the network must serve groups of users with different applications and different performance needs. Key operations that appear relatively straightforward, such as steering a customer's traffic flows to provide customized performance control or on-demand delivery, are very complex to implement with existing networks, especially at carrier scale. They require specialized devices at the network edge, thus increasing capital and operational expenditure as well as time-to-market to introduce new services.

• Vendor dependence:Carriers and enterprises seek to deploy new capabilities and services in rapid response to changing business needs or user demands. However, their ability to respond is hindered by vendors' equipment product cycles, which can range to three years or more. Lack of standard, open interfaces limits the ability of network operators to tailor the network to their individual environments.

This mismatch between market requirements and network capabilities has brought the industry to a tipping point. In response, the industry has created the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture and is developing associated standards.

The Need for a New Network Architecture

. The explosion of mobile devices and content, server virtualization, and advent of cloud services are among the trends driving the networking industry to reexamine traditional network architectures. Many conventional networks are hierarchical, built with tiers of Ethernet switches arranged in a tree structure. This design made sense when client-server computing was dominant, but such a static architecture is ill-suited to the dynamic computing and storage needs of today’s enterprise data centers, campuses, and carrier environments. Some of the key computing trends driving the need for a new network paradigm include:

• Changing traffic patterns: Within the enterprise data center, traffic patterns have changed significantly. In contrast to client-server applications where the bulk of the communication occurs between one client and one server, today's applications access different databases and servers, creating a flurry of "east-west" machine-to-machine traffic before returning data to the end user device in the classic "north-south" traffic pattern. At the same time, users are changing network traffic patterns as they push for access to corporate content and applications from any type of device (including their own), connecting from anywhere, at any time. Finally, many enterprise data centers managers are contemplating a utility computing model, which might include a private cloud, public cloud, or some mix of both, resulting in additional traffic across the wide area network.
• The "consumerization of IT": Users are increasingly employing mobile personal devices such as smartphones, tablets, and notebooks to access the corporate network. IT is under pressure to accommodate these personal devices in a fine-grained manner while protecting corporate data and intellectual property and meeting compliance mandates.
• The rise of cloud services: Enterprises have enthusiastically embraced both public and private cloud services, resulting in unprecedented growth of these services. Enterprise business units now want the agility to access applications, infrastructure, and other IT resources on demand and à la carte. To add to the complexity, IT's planning for cloud services must be done in an environment of increased security, compliance, and auditing requirements, along with business reorganizations, consolidations, and mergers that can change assumptions overnight. Providing self-service provisioning, whether in a private or public cloud, requires elastic scaling of computing, storage, and network resources, ideally from a common viewpoint and with a common suite of tools.
• "Big data" means more bandwidth: Handling today's "big data" or mega datasets requires massive parallel processing on thousands of servers, all of which need direct connections to each other. The rise of mega datasets is fueling a constant demand for additional network capacity in the data center. Operators of hyperscale data center networks face the daunting task of scaling the network to previously unimaginable size, maintaining any-to-any connectivity without going broke.

Architectural components

The following list defines and explains the architectural components

architecture diagram

SDN Application (SDN App): SDN Applications are programs that explicitly, directly, and programmatically communicate their network requirements and desired network behaviour to the SDN Controller via NBIs. In addition they may consume an abstracted view of the network for their internal decision making purposes. An SDN Application consists of one SDN Application Logic and one or more NBI Drivers. SDN Applications may themselves expose another layer of abstracted network control, thus offering one or more higher-level NBI(s) through respective NBI agent(s).

• SDN Controller: The SDN Controller is a logically centralized entity in charge of (i) translating the requirements from the SDN Application layer down to the SDN Datapaths and (ii) providing the SDN Applications with an abstract view of the network (which may include statistics and events). An SDN Controller consists of one or more NBI Agents, the SDN Control Logic, and the CDPI driver. Definition as a logically centralized entity neither prescribes nor precludes implementation details such as the federation of multiple controllers, the hierarchical connection of controllers, communication interfaces between controllers, nor virtualization or slicing of network resources.

• SDN Datapath: The SDN Datapath is a logical network device, which exposes visibility and uncontended control over its advertised forwarding and data processing capabilities. The logical representation may encompass all or a subset of the physical substrate resources. An SDN Datapath comprises a CDPI agent and a set of one or more traffic forwarding engines and zero or more traffic processing functions. These engines and functions may include simple forwarding between the datapath’s external interfaces or internal traffic processing or termination functions. One or more SDN Datapaths may be contained in a single (physical) network element—an integrated physical combination of communications resources, managed as a unit. An SDN Datapath may also be defined across multiple physical network elements. This logical definition neither prescribes nor precludes implementation details such as the logical to physical mapping, management of shared physical resources, virtualization or slicing of the SDN Datapath, interoperability with non-SDN networking, nor the data processing functionality, which can include L4-7 functions.

• SDN Control to Data-Plane Interface (CDPI): The SDN CDPI is the interface defined between an SDN Controller and an SDN Datapath, which provides at least (i) programmatic control of all forwarding operations, (ii) capabilities advertisement, (iii) statistics reporting, and (iv) event notification. One value of SDN lies in the expectation that the CDPI is implemented in in an open, vendor-neutral and interoperable way.
• SDN Northbound Interfaces (NBI): SDN NBIs are interfaces between SDN Applications and SDN Controllers and typically provide abstract network views and enable direct expression of network behavior and requirements. This may occur at any level of abstraction (latitude) and across different sets of functionality (longitude). One value of SDN lies in the expectation that these interfaces are implemented in in an open, vendor-neutral and interoperable way.

Bharat N Baxani (talk) 06:57, 12 June 2014 (UTC)