SDN, the new decade, rethinking: the transformation has shown its edge, and the dawn of intelligence is beginning to emerge

Technological innovation remains the most appropriate label for the past six months of 2017.

Whether it is VR bringing the virtual world into reality, human-machine games reigniting heated discussions on AI, the sharing economy becoming popular, cloud computing entering the second half, FinTech leading the industry's IT transformation, and the era of driverless cars about to emerge, a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial revolution is being nurtured.

Innovation means disruption. This is an era of either disruption or being disrupted. The same is true for the Internet industry.

[“Today I believe we're reinventing the network for the next 30 years,” Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in a media and analyst event in San Francisco. “We're truly building the network of the future.”]

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1. A butterfly effect in the Internet industry

Looking at today from the future, every tiny innovation may be the beginning of a butterfly effect, just as Apple ushered in the era of smart phones, Android system made the mobile Internet explode, and Uber brought about the sharing economy entrepreneurial boom.

In the field of data center networks, Martin Casado, a doctoral student at Stanford University, keenly discovered the problem: the interdependence caused by the tight coupling of multiple planes in network devices will restrict the system's technological innovation, stability, and scalability, and the scale problem may lead to performance problems. Martin led a research project on network security and management to realize a flexible network system that can be programmed like a computer. In 2006, a network model named Ethane was published as a project result. Ethane includes two important contents in the SDN architecture: flow table-based forwarding and central controller. It is not only the prototype of the SDN architecture, but also the predecessor of OpenFlow.

"OpenFlow: Enabling Innovation in Campus Networks", published in 2008 at the leading conference in the field of communication networks (ACM SIGCOMM), was proposed by Martin's mentor Professor Nick's team and has been cited more than 6,000 times. The emergence of OpenFlow and the first proposal of software-defined networking (SDN) have opened up a new vision for the network field and are also brewing a butterfly effect in the network industry.

SDN is the spark of network transformation

• This is the worst era, and it is also the worst era.
• SDN is the dream of innovators and the nightmare of defenders.

The network industry, which has been dormant for many years, has regained vitality with SDN. While operators and large enterprises are looking forward to SDN breaking the existing shortcomings of the network, equipment manufacturers are aware of the crisis.

Just as the PC market was divided into chips, hardware, operating systems, and application software, which created the "WinTel" empire (Windows and Intel) and the software development industry, SDN will divide the network industry.

The opening work of OpenFlow and the huge acquisition of Nicira, the first SDN company founded by its author Nick, by VMware, instigated this butterfly effect. In the originally closed market, which was dominated by giants and divided by large manufacturers, SDN opened the door to dreams for innovators. For a time, in the network industry, in the market segments such as switching chips, network operating systems, white box equipment, SDN controllers, and network applications, new players emerged and competed for the market. Overseas, more than 30 emerging network companies have joined this revolution, including Apstra, Barefoot, Big Switch, Cumulus, Nuage... In China, Centec, Yunshan, and Dahe have become emerging forces in China's network ecology.

How do traditional giants cope with the impact of SDN?