SDI Sum of the Parts

Traditional infrastructures are inflexible and static, and were not designed for programmatic control. Network functions were hard-wired into chips, control and data planes were tightly coupled, architecture was monolithic, configuration was device-specific and generally manual and there were no well-defined APIs for sharing data path state with applications. This means that running these networks is challenging -both complex and costly-and deploying new applications and services takes way too much time.

The need for a software defined infrastructure is clear. Experts say that adopting leading edge IT is critical for competitive differentiation and an infrastructure that is able to harness the full power of IT's core building blocks, computing, storage and networking- gives such distinct differentiation.

Experts say that India right now can leverage SDI solutions and increasingly CIOs, CFOs and CTOs are scrutinizing SDI and looking at ways and means to adopt within their own enterprises. Experts see a lot of traction for SDI in sectors like BFSI, Government and Healthcare in the coming days.

As IT organizations move to a converged infrastructure and service-oriented model, many are finding that current data center networking architectures are a limiting factor.

Industry experts say that Cloud computing has put in a real strain on traditional approaches to networking. Managing networks and networking services in a cloud environment is complex and time-consuming: to provision and configure the networking services for workloads in the cloud, customers often have to deal with creating and managing thousands of VLANs and VLAN rules. As a result, while provisioning a VM may take only 2 min, provisioning the associated network and networking services can add days or even weeks to the process. Furthermore, cloud computing benefits from applications' ability to move all around a datacenter (or even across datacenters). However, physical network topology limits workload mobility within the scope of a top-of-the-rack switch and a handful of servers. The industry clearly recognizes the need and opportunity to transform networking for the cloud, and thus to enable even more agility and efficiency in its operation.

The following Infograph from Intel clearly explains the multi pronged impact of a software defined infrastructure.