Speaking in Tech: WTF is Software Defined Networking, anyway?

Well, it's not Oracle's Xsigo

By Team Register, 28th November 2012

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Podcast

It's another episode of El Reg's enterprise techcast with The Dude of Tech Greg Knieriemen, storage meister Ed Saipetch and new media maven Sarah Vela. Their special guest is Greg Ferro of the Packet Pushers Podcast and EtherealMind.com, who gives us the skinny on software defined networking and what the big players are doing in the sector. It's kind of awesome - really interesting, thoughtful stuff... Do yourself a favour and put your headphones on.

This week, Ed is on another secret mission while Sarah is back and refreshed from her vacation.

This week we discuss…

Sarah's holiday
Catch-up with Ferro
Cisco's Acquisition of Meraki and premature blog posting
Defining Software Defined Networking
Xsigo and Vyatta's SDN washing
OpenStack as orchestration for SDN
Big Switch vs Nicira
Cisco's SDN play
Nicira and SDN - not for the enterprise

Listen with the Reg player below, or download here.

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Highly Rated

Posted Thursday 29th November 2012 15:51 GMT

Etherealmind

Re: "WTF is Software Defined Networking, anyway?"

best summary ever.

I'll take the £850 from anyone who wants to offer it to me.

I'm that networking guy, I live & freelance in the UK.

Posted Thursday 29th November 2012 15:50 GMT

Etherealmind

Re: wtf is SDN anyways

Hi Nate

I'm the networking guy that was on the podcast. I can suggest watching this Youtube from a year ago about the fundamentals of OpenFlow. May provide some insight into how it works.

It's really hard to explain why SDN/OPenFlow changes everythin without pictures.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZmbajtbNVk

Posted Thursday 29th November 2012 01:00 GMT

Nate Amsden

Re: wtf is SDN anyways

48 x 10G ports under $10k

those have been available for a while as well, I bought some last year :)

Actual cost was closer to about $8500 (after discount), and that was without any volume purchasing power (though I do have some friends in good places).

they were SFP+ switches, not 10GbaseT.

This switch has full L2+L3 support as well as Openflow support(w/bigswitch). It can be upgraded to support things like BGP etc with a license upgrade.

I think there are many other companies that have similar things. The key thing to get it under $10k is to remove the PHY. The same switch with the PHY is about double the cost. The main limitation without the PHY is there is some distance limits on cabling(for the most part nothing major- you can't run cables that traverse multiple kilometers for example). Though without the PHY this particular switch lacks the ability to do 40G uplinks, the PHY variant has 40G support(with an add-on module).