Lyatiss Blog
Information and opinions about Lyatiss and the cloud ecosystem.
The Soft Network
Network Virtualization and Software-defined Networks (SDN) are really hot, white-hot. But as more and more people try to understand these concepts it seems there is a great deal of confusion.
I attended Interop Las Vegas in May, presenting a demo of our CloudWeaver solution at the OpenFlow Lab. Many people including many network experts came to me with a deluge of questions such as “Why are these technologies considered so revolutionary?” or “Network virtualization is nothing new, isn’t it ?” or “Networks are already ‘software-defined’, aren’t they?”.
Spring: Opening the Stack!
April was a defining month for Cloud and Networking people in Silicon Valley with two major events of significant impact for the industry: Open Networking Summit and the OpenStack Conference.
Open Networking Summit was a gathering of top players looking at disruptive solutions for creating smart, reliable and cheap networks. Combining the software and virtualization approaches, they are looking at a new way of making the flow over the network be the new unit of control; in other words making the network virtual and “active”. Everybody was there: network vendors, services providers and researchers from top universities. This was a great moment for the entire networking community. It reminded me of all the work we have done on active networks as far back as 1997, on flow-aware networking, and on virtual networks. After years of gestation, I can now see emerging from this powerful groundswell very credible initiatives that will revitalize networking in a significant way. There is another major consequence of this network revolution: the emergence of a new developer community for the Network – think “Linux community for the Network”.