Everyone at this month's SDN/OpenFlow World Congress in Düsseldorf agreed on one thing: the show's bigger than ever. Now in its fourth iteration, this year's event was sold out, with about 1,800 guests in attendance, according to the organizers.
Change is afoot. “We want to produce fewer standards,” said Marc Cohn, senior director of market development for Ciena and chair of the market education committee, Open Networking Foundation . “It used to take many years to produce a standard—think of ethernet or OSI. Now we're being driven by the operator community to accelerate our timetable.”
“With SDN, 95% of end-users say they want programmable networks, but less than 5% use SDN, said Neela Jacques, executive director for the Open Daylight Project. “There are over 30 SDN controllers, and the problem is that no operator wants to run 5 to ten controllers.” Jacques said that would be “similar to each airline running its own air traffic control system.”
“Open ecosystems are about vendor-neutral rather then vendor-centric, as operators are now driving the business,” said Cohn. “Things are moving from management-based architecture to more SDN-based models where we can program switches & infrastructure—the OS will play a bigger role.”
“SDN is evolving,” said Cohn. “SDN and NFV will broaden the pie for everyone. That's what we're all vying for in the long run.”
Disaster recovery
Tetsuya Nakamura, senior research engineer, NTT DoCoMo, said his firm's goal was to “improve call acceptance rates during a disaster, like [the] March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.” Nakamura said that during that event, voice traffic jumped 50-fold, and only five percent of calls could connect—NTT now targets a success rate of 25% under such extreme circumstances.
“During a disaster, people aren't so concerned about data speeds, but they want voice connection,” said Nakamura. NTT's solution: dynamic resource allocation control using NFV.