The idea of programmability is the basis for the most precise definition of what SDN is: technology that separates the control plane management of network devices from the underlying data plane that forwards network traffic.
“With SDN growth and the shift toward software-based network automation, the network is regaining lost ground and moving into better alignment with a wave of new application workloads that are driving meaningful business outcomes.” What is SDN? “We're now at a point where SDN is better understood, where its use cases and value propositions are familiar to most datacenter network buyers and where a growing number of enterprises are finding that SDN offerings offer practical benefits,” Casemore said. In 2022, however, the physical network is expected to claim about $3.65 billion in revenue, slightly less than the $3.68 billion attributable to network virtualization overlays/SDN controller software but more than the $3.18 billion for SDN applications. In 2017, the physical network represented the largest segment of the worldwide datacenter SDN market, accounting for revenue of nearly $2.2 billion, or about 42% of the overall total revenue. The market generated revenue of nearly $5.15 billion in 2017, up more than 32.2% from 2016. IDC estimates that the worldwide data center SDN market will be worth more than $12 billion in 2022, recording a CAGR of 18.5% during the 2017–2022 period. SDN will be increasingly perceived as a form of established, conventional networking, Casemore said. "Datacenter modernization, driven by the relentless pursuit of digital transformation and characterized by the adoption of cloudlike infrastructure, will help to maintain growth, as will opportunities to extend datacenter SDN overlays and fabrics to multicloud application environments." "Datacenter SDN no longer attracts breathless hype and fevered expectations, but the market is growing healthily, and its prospects remain robust," wrote Brad Casemore, IDC research vice president, data center networks, in a recent report, Worldwide Datacenter Software-Defined Networking Forecast, 2018–2022. The Open Networking Foundation develops myriad open-source SDN technologies as well. In the years since its inception, SDN has evolved into a reputable networking technology offered by key vendors including Cisco, VMware, Juniper, Pluribus and Big Switch. OpenFlow defined a programmable network protocol that could help manage and direct traffic among routers and switches no matter which vendor made the underlying router or switch.
OpenFlow is only one of the first SDN canons, but it's a key component because it started the networking software revolution. SDN's origins can be traced to a research collaboration between Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley that ultimately yielded the OpenFlow protocol in the 2008 timeframe.
Hardware reigned supreme in the networking world until the emergence of software-defined networking (SDN), a category of technologies that separate the network control plane from the forwarding plane to enable more automated provisioning and policy-based management of network resources.