SDN Thoughts Post CLUS and Pre-Structure

At present I am on a bumpy VA flight over Lake Erie inbound to SFO for the GigaOM Structure conference. My employer will soon be a little less stealthy as we will have a new web page mid week around the Structure conference. I plan to do some blogging during or post Structure, but before we get to those post(s) I thought I would offer a few SDN thoughts post CLUS. I think what SDN is or will become is still unknown and I struggle with the need to find the killer app. SDN has not be defined. I do not think is had been agreed upon. I know that I have some different views on SDN. I actually do not like the term SDN; as networks have always been software defined and I do not think it is as easy as 20 min talk about separating the control plane from the data path on a white board. I am not sure what to offer up as a better term or acronym for SDN, but I think that I offer a few thoughts on SDN that our CEO is presenting at a conference prior to the Structure conference:

– Computation and algorithms, in a word math. That is what SDN is.

– Derive network topology and orchestration from the application and/or the tenant.

– Ensure application/tenant performance and reliability goals are accomplished.

– Make Network Orchestration concurrent with application deployment. This is what SDN is for.

– A controller has the scope, the perspective and the resources to efficiently compute and fit application instantences and tenants onto the network

I know is this considerably less than 93 slides, so I am going to look to augment the previous five points in the future. At Structure, I will looking at what others are doing and listening to the broad ecosystems of competitors, customers and analysts. If you are out at Structure, feel free to stop by the Plexxi table and tell me I am wrong. I look forward to the discussion at Structure or one of the dinners I plan to attend. Side note…this is test of MarsEdit and the ability to post from a cross country flight.

/wrk