Let software take the strain off your data centre

Promise of SDN depends on abstractions

[full disclosure: I work at a startup in the SDN space, and previously drove SDN strategy at Juniper]

The discussion of SDN as more than a means of automating provisioning is spot on. If all we get out of SDN is a better managed system, we have aimed too low as an industry.

That said, I thought it odd to talk about OpenFlow. For any of the really cool application-network interaction to happen, we need to settle first on some of the higher-level abstractions. The underlying protocols are perhaps the least interesting thing to settle on.

I would rather see discussions about how to describe workloads, what properties need to be preserved for those workloads, and how we manipulate work loads. I think that those in the OpenFlow camp might prove to be right in picking an underlying protocol, but they will have failed to deliver anything exceptional because they missed the forest for the tree.

Mike Bushong (@mbushong)

Plexxi

@Tim Phillips

:P