In a recap of the recent IEEE Hot Interconnects 2015 conference, networking news site Viodi.com featured a tutorial on Software Defined WANs co-led by ESnet Chief Technologist Inder Monga and Srini Seetharaman of Infinera. Viodi (pronounced V-O-D) provides information about broadband networks to independent network operators and their vendors. The 2015 Hot Interconnects, the 23rd in the conference series, was held Aug. 26-28 in Santa Clara.
According to Viodi.com, the tutorial on “Software Defined WANs (which is a much broader topic than SDN for WANs)…was a terrific ‘tag team’ lecture/discussion by Inder & Srini who alternated describing each slide/diagram. We present selected highlights below.
“Inder summarized many fundamental problems in all facets of WANs:
- Agility requirements are not met for WAN provisioning (sometimes takes days or weeks to provision a new circuit or IP-MPLS VPN)
- Traditional wide-area networking is inflexible, opaque and expensive
- WAN resources are not efficiently utilized (over-provisioning prevails)
- Interoperability issues across vendors, layers and domains reduces chance of automation
- Hard to support new value propositions, like: Route selection at enterprises, Dynamic peering at exchanges, Auto bandwidth and bandwidth calendaring, Mapping elephant (very large) data flows to different Flexi-Grid channels
“Srini commented that the Network Virtualization (NV)/ overlay model has more market traction than the pure SDN/Open Flow model.”
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