[Sdnp] updated SDN problem statement draft

[Tina TSOU]

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 14, 2012, at 6:27 AM, "Ping Pan" <ping at pingpan.org<mailto:ping at pingpan.org>> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 5:23 AM, Scott Brim <scott.brim at gmail.com<mailto:scott.brim at gmail.com>> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 11:48, David Meyer <dmm at 1-4-5.net<mailto:dmm at 1-4-5.net>> wrote:
> Thanks Ping. Search for dmm> in-line.

>    Software Defined Network (SDN) is an overlay architecture that
>    presents the underlying transport network to the applications and
>    services for monitoring, and provisioning at abstraction level.
>
>
> dmm> Is it true that SDN an overlay architecture, or is this SDN
> dmm> something different than what is being termed SDN in the
> dmm> industry? If so maybe we should use a different term?

>From a distance I'm still wondering about this group's "SDN" and other
"SDNs".  This definition doesn't sound like an overlay architecture,
rather it sounds like element management.

Yeah, I hear you. Let's forget about ONF SDN, IETF SDN and other flavors of SDN's and names. Let's just focus on its original concept that first advocated by Scott Shenker and others - we may have misinterpreted it quite a bit. However, over the past many months, we keep asking: what is it? why us? how does it really work at engineering level? what business will it serve?

For a long time, we have been trying to go through all the material, products and use cases that we can get our hands on, and met many who are working in this area. There are a couple of enlighten moments, especially, when I saw the campus deployment in Indiana University. Through the use of routers plus OpenFlow-enabled OEM boxes, the virtual NOC can control and allocate bandwidth to different users. The users can run a totally independent network off servers, and run some very simple applications. The total cost of ownership is tiny, the management of the virtual NOC is getting crazy, but the potential it presents is amazing.  (The guy was telling me that the excitement, the craziness and the unknowns are very much like when we were doing NFSnet :-))

This "virtual" network is presenting itself with a real engineering challenge to overcome. User registration is a problem. The existing provisioning methodology is way too trivial via OpenFlow, on the other hand, the box itself is dirt cheap. The basic network management, including coordinating network alarms to the virtual users/applications, is not in place. Redundancy and protection - what are they? ;-) Yes, the north-bound API's do not exist in any standard form....
Doesn't SOP do this job?

We can call whatever the name we want, but I think this is an area that IETF can address and contribute.

Regards,

Ping
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