Over the past few years, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been a key buzz in the computer networking/IT industry. Today, more and more companies are discussing SDN to leverage it for their business and future growth plans. Reason being, SDN reduces CAPEX (capital expenses of network equipment) and OPEX (operational and maintenance expenses) of a network, and that’s what every business in the networking industry wants at the end of the day.
That brings us to the question, what is so special about SDN that existing or legacy networking is not able to deliver?
Basically, traditional networks can’t cope up and meet current networking requirements like dynamic scalability, central control and management, on the fly changes or experiments, lesser error-prone manual configurations on each networking node, handling of network traffic (which has massively increased due to boom of mobile data), and server virtualization traffic in data centres.
What’s more, traditional networks are tightly coupled with highly expensive network elements that don’t offer any kind of openness or ability to customize internals. To deal with such issues, open source communities came together to define a networking approach for future. And that’s how the concept of SDN came to life.
Read more at HowtoForge