Most enterprise IT project managers have, at one time or another, felt the frustration of having to wait days, weeks, or even months for their IT departments to provision the resources necessary to run a new application. Cloud computing offers the potential to reduce the time to wait for computational and storage resources, so the networking remains the sole bottleneck to fast deployment, Casado said.
Some of the networking chores involved in setting up a new application include assigning that application an Internet Protocol number or numbers, configuring the firewalls to recognize legitimate traffic going to that application, and setting up a VLAN that will partition off the application from others on the same network. The organization's access control list may need to be updated and a load balancer may have to be added as well. Lastly, all of these changes to the network must be logged.
The OpenFlow protocol, along with supporting SDN technologies, provides a way to decouple the control software from network switches and routers, setting the stage to automate, or at least expedite, many of these tasks.
In a blog entry posted Wednesday, Casado further expounded on the industry shift to SDN.
"In this architecture, software on the edge ... provides functionality that has typically been found in the network," Casado wrote. "As a result, this software is largely decoupled from the underlying physical network and can be run over any general purpose network hardware that provides IP connectivity."
One big, enthusiastic user of OpenFlow is Google. "We've invested in building our own OpenFlow routers and put them in our data centers," said Vint Cerf, during his keynote at the Usenix LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conference in San Diego last December. Cerf is a Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist, as well as the co-creator of the TCP protocol that is part of the Internet backbone.
With OpenFlow "you can do a very good job of managing where the flows go in your underlying transport system, so we are able to get very high percentage of utilization out of a optical fiber network," Cerf said.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com
