NFV AND SDN

What is SDN?

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a function to computer networking that allows network administrators to govern network services through abstraction of lower-level purpose. SDN is meant to respond to the fact that the static formation of conventional networks doesn’t support the dynamic, scalable computing and storage needs of more radical computing environments such as data centers. This is done by demerging or disassociating the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent (the control plane) from the lurking systems that forward traffic to the selected destination (the data plane).

ADVANTAGES OF NFV AND SDN

NFV also is flexible, cost-effective, scalable, and secure. With these benefits, NFV addresses several trends shaping service provider networks.

• Adaptability: To adapt quickly to users’ changing needs and provide new services, operators must be able to scale their network architecture across multiple servers, rather than being limited by what a single box can do.
• Virtualization in another service provider network: To meet customers’ needs better, service providers want the ability to substantiate their service anywhere in the world using virtualization.
• Extensibility: NFV provides operators who are looking to quickly deploy new services with much more flexible and adaptable network.
• Security: It has been, and continues to be, a major challenge in networking. Operators want to be able to provision and manage the network while allowing their customers to run their own virtual space and firewall securely within the network
• Expenditure: Expenses are the primary consideration for any operator or service provider these days and using virtual machines instead of physical routers, physical firewalls and physical load balancers forgoes a long way in cost/expense cutting.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF SDN

Shallow and Deep SDN:

• In this form of SDN, a virtual overlay network is created between vSwitches. The traffic paths between vSwitches run over a traditional routed/switched network, or perhaps a switched fabric network. Because it relies on vSwitches as the overlay network endpoints, it is primarily a data centre SDN solution.
• Deep SDN is a method of controlling packet forwarding behaviour, one that can perform policy routing without complex combinations of protocols, as is required in shallow SDN. The logically centralized controller is able to see the entire network topology and make smarter decisions about the paths to use for each traffic type