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Vint Cerf: SDN Is a Model For a Better Internet
Nerval's Lobster writes "Vint Cerf, one of the 'founders of the Internet,' told an audience April 16 that if he could do it all over again, he would construct the Internet in the mold of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Cerf, who co-designed the TCP/IP protocol suite with Bob Kahn, said that he admired how SDN separates the data plane from the control plane, which allows the network to be controlled via software from an external server. One of the hazards of conjoining the two, he added, was the attack risk. 'I wish we had done [the separation] in the Internet design, but we didn't,' Cerf told the audience for his keynote address at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. 'In a very interesting way you have an opportunity to reinvent this whole notion of networking.'"
The Economist, December 15th, 2012:
"“The technology is riding the fine line between promise and hype,” says Rick Tinsley, the boss of Silver Peak Systems, a networking firm. Sceptics fret that cost savings could easily be eaten up by the expense of new SDN controllers and software.
Better still, SDN makes it easier to reconfigure a network to, say, launch a new application for employees or customers. Its boosters liken it to a mobile-phone operating system onto which new apps can be loaded quickly and seamlessly. Small wonder, then, that companies such as Facebook and Google have been studying SDN carefully. Google runs two vast networks—one that links its huge data centres together and another that delivers its services to the outside world. The company has already deployed SDN across its data-centre network (which was not involved in this week’s snafu) and says that extending it to the external network is “inevitable”. Many big financial institutions and telecoms firms are also experimenting with the technology."
It's funny how great inventions were invented by chance. If the supposedly "great" inventors would re-do it today, they'd do it wrong and ruin it.
We attach too much credit to the people. It is the situation which led to the invention.
Putting the smarts in the network means cable tv and POTS.
More like cellular. At least on POTS the telco doesn't do anything with what you're sending.
The internet would be nothing more than the home shopping channel had they gone that route.
Yes. And those of us who were there at the beginning were against that. Centralized "software defined networks" already existed. Tymnet, Telenet, and X.25 were all centrally controlled, along with Prestel (UK), Minitel (France), and Qube (Columbus, Ohio). We knew what that world looked like, and rejected it.
The model for "software defined networking" is that users talk mostly to a limited number of sites (Google, Facebook, Youtube, Comcast, etc.) In that model, the service provider would like to control where their users connect to the many locations of the service. Google previously was pushing for a non-cached non-anonymous DNS system, so that the identity of the user determined where a DNS reference resolved. Nobody liked that much.