Legacy network infrastructures have become very complex and cumbersome to manage due to hardware centric approach, interoperability challenges, common manual configurations, closed & proprietary protocols, management processes hardcoded into the underlying hardware platform, and inefficient use of network resources. Traditional network architectures are vendor-dependent bringing unnecessary complexity, and the inability to effectively scale and perform at high volumes. As a result, networks are ill-suited to meet the requirements of today’s enterprises, modern Internet (including IoT) & Cloud computing technologies, service providers and end-users. SDN addresses these issues by being flexible, manageable, uncomplicated, reliable, cost-effective, and adjustable; targeting to accommodate the high-bandwidth requirements and the needs of today’s demanding applications.
SDN decouples the control and data planes, also the virtual resources remain uncoupled from the physical resources, turning the network control into directly programmable platform and the underlying hardware architecture to be abstracted for database layered systems, applications and network & security services.