In order to dynamically adapt a network to the needs of a specific application, enterprise is increasingly looking at adding intelligence to interactions between network services and the network infrastructure.

Network programmability has become imperative since it offers significant benefits to organizations from business agility to cost reduction as they address new demands on the enterprise network. Concepts such as software-defined networking (SDN) and infrastructure programmability are generating a lot of attention in the industry, and this is poised to become an indispensable part of a comprehensive strategy.

The industry has been witnessing a fundamental challenge around the disparity from 30-50 percent annual growth in networking and storage capacity requirements and five to seven percent annual increase in IT budgets. The growing adoption of cloud-based services and soaring generation and consumption of data storage are driving exponential growth in the volume of data crossing the network to and from the cloud.

With the growth in data traffic far outstripping the infrastructure build-out required to support it, network managers are under pressure to find smarter ways to improve performance.

For years, IT organizations have become adept at optimizing infrastructure for traditional measures such as availability, performance, or cost. Organizations are now looking beyond these measures and looking to see how effective their IT infrastructure is at supporting primary organizational functions such as improving customer experiences or helping employees easily collaborate to solve problems or strategize. This represents a shift from optimizing customer transactions to optimizing customer interaction.

New Approach

There is an emerging shift in the types of applications that enterprise organizations address. Cloud, mobility, and social networking are all becoming intrinsic elements of enterprise applications - often all at the same time. This change is promoting different demands on IT infrastructure. For instance, data center traffic is shifting from a small number of applications with well-established traffic patterns to traffic patterns that are volatile and arbitrary. Cumulative effect of these changes is a need for IT infrastructure to be more agile, more adaptable, and more in sync with the applications it supports. These are nascent dynamics in the enterprise - the immediacy of these challenges varies greatly from organization to organization.

The dominating vendors in the enterprise network industry have been forced to get onboard with SDN or face losing their customers as the trend takes off. Not just the networking industry, but also SDN is expected to find their way across the whole of the data center, forcing other large vendors join the bandwagon with the new approach. The software defined model is pervasive; it is going to happen across the entire infrastructure.

Ericsson, Cisco, Google, Huawei, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Juniper, NEC, NTT Docomo, Texas Instruments, VMware, and others together launched an Open Networking Research Center (ONRC), which is expected to be a collaborative research effort to explore SDN as the new networking paradigm and provide open-source networking tools and platforms.

Vendors including Cisco, Juniper, and Brocade have announced their SDN strategies. The fact that big vendors are taking on the technology shows how SDN is affecting the market place, making traditionally closed companies take a more open approach. Organizations are petrified of losing out to the more innovative start-ups releasing SDN solutions and this got to the core of their business models.

Vendors are coming out with a broad range of innovative new products to market under the SDN for enterprise, data center, and carrier transport networks. These are early days for SDN with equipment just becoming available.

In emerging scale-out architectures like SDN, the control plane is separated from the data plane, and then typically executed on standard servers. In both scale-up and scale-out architectures, intelligent multicore communications processors that combine general-purpose processors with specialized hardware acceleration engines can dramatically improve control plane performance. Functions, such as packet processing and traffic management, can often be offloaded to line cards equipped with these purpose-built communications processors. The market is just beginning to realize the value of SDN in carrier transport networks apart from data centers. Cisco, Huawei, ADVA, Ciena, ConteXtream, and Cyan have all put efforts to incorporate SDN technology into their carrier transport products. The year 2013 will be a big year for SDN equipment availability.