Editor’s note: SDN, which stands for software defined networking, is a term that people will be reading and hearing a great deal more about in coming years. Why? Because SDN is transforming the way people and companies communicate across networks, writes John Moore, who is senior director of innovation and strategy and chief security officer at MCNC, which operates the state-wide NCREN broadband network.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has captured the imagination of the networking community.

At its heart, it’s both a simple and revolutionary idea – break apart the two major functions of the routers and switches that run the Internet and separate them onto different hardware platforms. The part that actually moves individual packets of information (the data plane) stays in the middle of the network and does its job, while the part that determines how those packets should be forwarded (the control plane) moves to a server that talks to the routers and switches (the controller).

One advantage of this separation is that it opens interfaces between the component functions and allows for innovation by technology companies and the open source software community. The controller component in particular is ripe for developing compelling new products and building market share.

The challenges, however, are significant.

What was once a tightly integrated system engineered by a single team is now a set of individual components that need to be tested for functionality and interoperability, secured, and effectively managed.

Service providers have found ways to begin utilizing some of the capabilities of SDN, particularly those interested in making computing and storage resources available in novel ways.

DukeNet recently announced a proof of concept trial that is typical of the current state of the technology. Not long ago, Google also made a significant splash by reporting it had deployed SDN in a production environment on its back-end network between data centers.

These examples are of single enterprises managing an internal network.

A more significant challenge is how to take advantage of SDN capability in a multi-domain environment where the networks managed by individual businesses, schools, ISPs, content providers, and others work cooperatively to provide end-to-end, SDN-based services.

This is where the state of SDN is still in the realm of research and development.

R&D Continues Locally, Nationally

As with the development of the Internet, the Research and Education (R&E) networking community is a key player in the early stages of SDN.

Stanford University was instrumental in the development and adoption of OpenFlow, a protocol used on the “southbound” interface (between the controller and the router). Internet2, an organization that provides a national backbone service to the R&E community has deployed a multi-vendor Advanced Layer 2 Service that is testing and incrementally deploying production SDN capabilities.

Closer to home, both NC State University and Duke have won awards from the National Science Foundation’s Campus Cyberinfrastructure Initiative to re-engineer parts of their campus networks to support data intensive science and networking research.

Both proposals cited SDN as a key component.

MCNC, the nonprofit broadband service provider for the R&E community in North Carolina, is in the early stages of developing an SDN test bed to support the campus cyberinfrastructure projects as well as other science and research initiatives at UNC Chapel Hill and at the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI). The ultimate goal of the effort is to provide a stable platform within the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN) service portfolio that would allow the expansion of the collaboration to other research universities (via the Internet2 service) and local networking and software firms.

So, SDN is here, and there are some pioneering production applications and trials currently happening in North Carolina and in other parts of the world, but much work remains before standards mature and the entire ecosystem is supported by stable mainstream products and services.

(C) MCNC