Competitive Advantage of Choosing SDN Network

Large Web scale organizations have been openly discussing their SDN inventions as a key competitive differentiator. Delivering, massive scale, high performance and low latency in both data centers and wide area networks have now become a race for many large scale cloud providers.

Companies have invested greatly in Software Defined Networking both in their wide area networks and the data centers, and many have published details about the indigenous SDN software and white box switch implementations. To achieve high performance, low latency and massive scale, it has now become a competitive race for the hyper scale cloud providers.

What differentiate hyper scale SDN networks from other networks is their scale, performance, reliability, and their management/provisioning requirements. Web scale organizations are in fact gigantic in the scale of their storage and computing capacity. Their data centers usually range from 250,000 to 500,000 square feet and house 100,000 to 500,000 physical servers.

Large data centers require huge amounts of network bandwidth between virtual and physical servers. Therefore, in the near future, the Ethernet links will be shifting from 10GB to 100GB with potential speeds of 25GB, 40GB and 50GB. Transmitting traffic between the internet and huge data centers is managed by improved SDN Switch.

Many big firms introducing new data center network design of large switching capacity. Some optical vendors are moving to deliver cost effective, dense optical connections to support web scale needs for 100GB optical links per data center location.

The increase in capability of the hyper scale data centers makes provisioning, network bandwidth a major challenge for the IT organizations. Many firms are now discovering alternatives for their network, which is too large to physically provision and are introducing the automation which is a key goal for their SDN performance.

Web Scale Providers promoting their Hyper scale SDN Networks

In latest trade shows such as the Open Network User Group and Open Network Summit, the executives from Huge IT firms provided important facts on the performance, scale and architecture of their wide area networks and data centers. Their exceptional network environments have supported them to develop their own SDN and white box switch hardwares. The benefits of these SDN Networks are now starting to drop down in the market as the details are openly disclosed in public. The goal of the web scale providers is to commercialize the network at large scale in the same way they have helped to commercialize the storage market and servers.

A detail on ready-to-use SDN includes:

• Huge IT firms have started leveraging the SDN features to create a definite software control stack, which is capable to manage thousands of switches inside the data center and consider them as one large fabric. The software defined network allows 100,000 servers to exchange the data at 10Gbps within a single data center unit which helped in increasing the capacity up to 100x from last few years.
• New software is introduced recently, which implements a hybrid of centralized and distributed control to supervise its network. This software is known as the Linux based Top-of-rack network switch, it is the Wedge that plans to make an open-source hardware design with the help of Open Compute Project. The 6-pack platform is the core of its fabric, and it uses wedge as its basic building block.
• Companies’ compute and storage usage is doubling every six months and their cloud platform consists of around 22 hyper scale regions around the world with millions of hosts. The SDN network requires a virtualized, self-provisioning, partitioned and scale-out design, delivered through the SDN Switch on different servers. Some organizations uses self designed Virtual Filtering Platforms and Vnets to enable SDN’S data plane to act as a Hyper- scale virtual network.

These technology advancements in network design are possible to drop down to venture scale wide area networks and data centers over the next several years.

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