Story 2014-09-15 2SE8 Uptake of software-defined networking routing hurting hardware sales

Uptake of software-defined networking routing hurting hardware sales

by
in hardware on (#2SE8)
story imageTypically, September and October are a period that sees an uptick in sales of networking hardware - routers, switches, and the like. Not this year. In fact, industry analysts have noted a drop in sales, and attribute it to increasingly widespread corporate investments in software defined networking (SDN) equipment.

Industry heavyweights like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and others are already heavily invested in OpenFlow and SDN, but it seems to be taking hold on a much wider scale, and not just in ultra-massive data centers.
"We're at the beginning if the S curve [in SDN] with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and NTT adopting and a few others actively deploying it, but it will be several years before it is mainstream," said Guru Parulkar, the chair of the event and executive director at the Open Networking Research Center that works on SDN.

"We will build network infrastructure with white boxes running merchant silicon, open-source network OSs, and services. This will not happen overnight, but it will come."

In the SDN vision, many tasks will be handled as applications running on Linux servers, said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation behind the OpenFlow protocol: "The future of the network is Ethernet, x86, and OpenFlow -- nothing is controlled by a single party, it's all community based."
Bad news for Cisco and friends, but they're only suffering what the desktop computer makers suffered a decade ago, and Sun and the rest of the server manufacturers before them.
Reply 7 comments

Softer not always better (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-16 10:27 (#2SES)

Many of our routers are switches are now virtual servers acting as switches. Lots of problems. Hardware rarely crashes or slows down.

Re: Softer not always better (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 11:20 (#2SF1)

I think I agree with you. I like some hardware staying hardware. I've gotten used to virtual servers though and that seems like a good idea. The thing is, if the 'hardware' is just software and an abstraction layer running on hardware that would've been similar to the other hardware, then what's the point? You save money but you lose time in the abstraction. Maybe I'm not being clear:

Router: silicon chips, transistors, resistors, copper wiring.
Server: silicon chips, transistors, resistors, copper wiring.
Virtual router: a server and some software. Doesn't seem like you come out ahead here?

Re: Softer not always better (Score: 1)

by genx@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 13:23 (#2SF4)

I can't wait for the next step: all this re-implemented in Javascript over a Python engine:-)

Re: Softer not always better (Score: 2, Funny)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 14:30 (#2SF8)

... which a team of 20 year olds then throws out so they can reimplement it in Ruby and the latest OO framework ...

Re: Softer not always better (Score: 1)

by genx@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 16:48 (#2SFG)

a team of 20 year olds
These are called seniors in open software development nowadays.

Re: Softer not always better (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-16 14:23 (#2SF7)

You are missing a step. A lot of our software routers are VMs.. now think about that for a moment..

Re: Softer not always better (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-16 14:32 (#2SF9)

I'd be surprised if *most* of them weren't already VMs. I mean, this revolution is coming on the tails of the previous one, right?