SDN And NFV – Interesting Times
Looking back May 2015 may become known as the month when big money recognized Network Virtualization. Early in the month Ciena announced an agreement to acquire Cyan for $400 million to strengthen their portfolio of Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization products. The fag end of the month then saw HP announcing successful conclusion of discussions to acquire ConteXtream, a provider of OpenDaylight-based, carrier-grade SDN fabric for NFV. The idea of Software Defined Networking was born in large enterprise and campus networks. Making network devices programmable and controlled by a central element was an idea whose time had come and standards like OpenFlow and the OpenDaylight Project followed. With Cloud Data Centers becoming larger and more complex it seemed an obvious “use case” for SDN – this is an area where SDN has more or less taken root. Carriers and other network service providers came together to form the European Telecommunications Standards In...