At the Open Networking Summit (ONS) this week, vendors big and small are talking about the success and direction of the open networking movement, including Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and whitebox hardware. There’s much reason for optimism, but there are a number of key challenges, too.
Guru Parulkar, Chair of ONS and the Executive Director at the Open Networking Research Center (ONRC), said in his opening keynote that open networking in 2016 has overcome many technological and business barriers. “We can safely say that a new era of networking is here,” Parulkar said.
The new era of networking is defined by several key trends: disaggregation, a move to software virtualization, and open source. Parulkar noted that from a hardware perspective, the increasing availability of high-performance, programmable network silicon is helping enable the new era of networking.
