Flow based routing and openflow

Question

This may not be the typical stackoverflow question.

A colleague of mine has been speculating that flow-based routing is going to be the next big thing in networking. O

Answer 1

Nathan, Excellent historical account and overview of openflow. Thanks!

You've hit on the points that I've been wrapping my head around as to why Openflow might not be widely adopted. Since it was designed to be open to allow researcher the ability to run experimental protocols and not necessarily be "compatible with" the big players Cisco/HP/etc. it puts itself into niche (although potentially big) market, more on this later. And as you've stated it's recieved some adoption in the "cloud data centers (CDC)" e.g. google, facebook, etc because they need to exploit experimental protocols to gain a competitive advantage or optimize for their application.

As you've stated some switch vendors have added openflow capability to capitalize on the niche need in academia and potentially sell into the CDC; google, facebook. This is potentially a big market (or bubble if you're pessimistic).

The problem that I see is that the majority of the market (80% or more) is enterprise IT data centers. The requirements here is for stable, compatible networking. Open and less expensive would be nice, but not at the cost of the former.

One could think of a day where corporate IT is partially or completely cloud-sourced where QoS is maintained by the cloud provider. In this case, experimental protocols could be leveraged to provide a competitive advantaged for speed or QoS. In which case; openflow could play a more dominant roll. I personally think this scenario is many years off.

So, the conclusion I come to is that other than in research and perhaps CDCs (google, facebook), the market is pretty small. I suppose that if researchers use openflow to come up with a better protocol for say link aggregation, or congestion management, then eventually Cisco and HP will provide those in their standard offering because their customers will demand it. So openflow could be a market influencer (via the research community), but it would not be a market disruptor.

Do you agree with my conclusions? Thanks for your input.