Software Defined Networking (SDN)

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture that is dynamic, manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable, being ideal for the high-bandwidth, dynamic nature of today's applications. This architecture decouples the network control and forwarding functions enabling the network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted for applications and network services. In order to make that happen the OpenFlow® protocol is a foundational element.

SDNs are thought as directly & programmatically configured, agile, centrally managed, open standard based and vendor neutral networks. This facts allow for a fast, common and simplified way to adapt the network infrastructure to the networking requirements of a particular moment given by the applications and services running on top.

SDN solutions allow to bypass the design restrictions of current networks. Actual networks are extremely complicated and any modification made to the topology has an enormous risk to affect somehow at the overall performance of the network or a particular service. This complexity also creates an inability to scale the system since time-honored subscription systems do not allow for effective network over design to support the highly variant traffic. Also current network's complexity is in a big part because of incompatibilities between vendors. Through the use of open SDN standards all this problems can be solved since the network would be able to optimize the use of its resources and automatically change its topology in order to satisfy the requirements of a given moment either it be a workload peak or just an unusual traffic  situation.

SDNs also allow for customizing and separating clients networks. Through the use of the Openflow API virtual networks can automatically be deployed to satisfy the different costumer needs including predefined plans which can be operative in pretty amazingly short intervals. All this together allows for a flexible and agile data center design where network requirements can rapidly change and be applied to the infrastructure without disrupting any service.