Posted on 20 September, 2022

Why your Company needs to Adopt SDN.

Why your Company needs to Adopt SDN.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a network architecture that decouples the control and data planes, moving the control plane (network intelligence and policy making) to an application called a controller.

Enterprise and service providers are seeking solutions to their networking challenges.

Their basic requirements are: -

  • They want their networks to adjust and respond dynamically, based on their business policy.
  • They want those policies to be automated so that they can reduce the manual work and personnel costs of running their networks.
  • They want to quickly deploy and run new applications within and on top of their networks so that they can deliver business results.
  • They want to do this in a way that allows them to introduce these new capabilities without disrupting their business.

SDN address all the above requirements which are lacking in today’s network devices.

Inside every networking and security device–every switch, router, and firewall—you can separate the software into four layers or planes.

4 Planes of Network

These 4 planes are briefed here below: -

  1. Forwarding: The bottom plane, Forwarding, does the heavy lifting of sending the network packets on their way.
  2. Control: If the Forwarding plane is the brawn of the network, Control is the brains.
  3. Services: Sometimes network traffic requires more processing and for this, the Services plane does the job
  4. Management: Like all computers, network devices need to be configured, or managed. The Management plane provides the basic instructions of how the network device should interact with the rest of the network.

Today’s network devices deploy these 4 planes as shown below: -

Today’s Network device

What you have today are individual networking devices, with monolithic software, that must be manually configured. This makes everything harder than it needs to be especially in big and growing enterprise-wide network.

So, if today’s networking software is the root of the problem, better software is the solution and that’s where SDN comes in.

Centralized Functions

The purpose of SDN is to reduce cost and improve user experience by automating the full range of network services, from end user to network element. Principles that promote this include the decoupling of control from traffic processing and forwarding, centralization of control, and the ability of customers and applications to interact directly with network control. This is achieved with the architecture deployed in SDN.

The Architecture of SDN

If you are interested knowing more on SDN and to have our free technical consultancy on the sizing, please feel free to contact us on +254708154598