SDN and Overlay Networks – It’s all about fit and features

This post has been sitting in my queue since October, I felt it was time to let it go. It's all about fit and features in Software Defined Overlay Networks Midokura MidoNet: What is it? Midokura's MidoNet creates a fully-meshed overlay network built on top of your current IP network.  MidoNet's defining feature is the claimed ability to fully process a packet at the edge of … [Read more...]

Network APIs and their impact on Network Architecture

Network APIs and their impact on Network Architecture In Network Architecture there are a many small decisions that go along with the one big one, mainly which vendor(s) to use.  Some architects have their favorite, the vendor that has earned the architects trust.  Other architects make a new decision each time, trying to base their vendor decision on both the clients wishes a … [Read more...]

ETSI Network Function Virtualization Working Group

Network Function Virtualization or NFV for short is a call to action that looks to aggregate resources across networking, compute and storage. A collaboration of many of the large players in the telecommunications space, the original NFV call to action focused on lowering the amount of proprietary hardware necessary to launch and operate services. The solution as discussed in t … [Read more...]

What is Commodity Hardware?

Commodity Hardware is not the old machine you found under a desk.. You will often see "runs on commodity hardware" on a SDN product website.  What does it really mean? Sometimes when Router Analysis gets a new piece of SDN software to test the results come out much better or worse than what the vendor claims.  The most recent occurrence of lower performance happened as we st … [Read more...]

Network Hardware and SDN

How Does SDN Fit Into The Virtual Data Center? One thing that needs to be cleared up is the definition of  Network or Networking Hardware.  In the definition of SDN from ONF they discuss the decoupling of the Control and Data Plane with the Data Plane being defined as Network Hardware.  Here is where things can get confusing. What is Network Hardware? Wikipedia says the fo … [Read more...]