The Marist test bed demonstrates SDN functionality for true network virtualization and resource pooling among geographically dispersed data centers, with on-the-fly changes to the requirements of applications triggering rapid provisioning and dynamic wavelength assignment across a network’s infrastructure. The test bed shows how SDN could ultimately be leveraged to enable compelling cost efficiencies and revenue opportunities by delivering new levels of provisioning and automation.

Ongoing development

As attractive as the outlook for future operations of large-scale networks may be, the vision of real-world, commercial deployments of SDN control across multiple network layers and truly transparent, wavelength-switched optical networks is still continuing to take shape. Additional development is required, and the need for openness is evident.

Even in these early stages of SDN’s extension across all network layers, it’s already clear that proprietary platforms and APIs are not the future. Their inherent inflexibility and costs run contrary to the efficiencies that large network and data-center operators hope SDN’s extension will ultimately help deliver. Proprietary protocols and management systems are at the heart of today’s fragmented and specialized approaches to network management and control, which have left large operators with limited scalability and significant configuration complexities.

The best path forward, obviously, is open—open-source SDN controllers, open southbound interfaces into the network’s nodes and partitions, open northbound interfaces into higher-layer control programs—ensuring maximum flexibility for the bandwidth demands of tomorrow. It helps explain the interest in initiatives such as the Open Networking Foundation, which promotes the adoption of SDN through open standards development in addition to leading the charge for global standardization of the OpenFlow protocol, and OpenDaylight, a collaborative open-source project that’s also working to accelerate SDN adoption and the development of a common, open SDN framework.

SDN figures to be one of the key technologies that binds single-stroke orchestration of end-to-end IT and network resources and holistic control of those resources, not to mention storage and virtualized resources, via one unified API. Demonstrations like the test bed at Marist College are vital to exploring possibilities such as multilayer reconfiguration, workflow automation and data-center load balancing.

SDN is probably the biggest innovation in networking in decades. Extending it to the optical-transport layer facilitates multilayer and multidomain programmability, and as a result, completely new business models can be developed. That’s how revolutionary the capabilities could turn out to be for large network operators and their users.