Vendor-Independent Software-Defined Networking : Beyond The Hype

Sammanfattning: Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging trend in networking that offers a number of advantages such as smoother network management over traditional networks. By decoupling the control and data planes from network elements, a huge amount of new opportunities arise, especially in network virtualization. In cloud datacenters, where virtualization plays a fundamental role, SDN presents itself as the perfect candidate to ease infrastructure management and to ensure correct operation. Even if the original SDN ideology advocates openness of source and interfaces, multiple networking vendors offer their own proprietary solutions. In this work, an open-source SDN solution, named Tungsten Fabric, will be deployed in a virtualized datacenter and a number of SDN-related use-cases will be examined. The main goal of this work is to determine whether Tungsten Fabric can deliver the same set of use-cases as a proprietary solution from Juniper, named Contrail Cloud. Finally, this work will give some guidelines on whether open-source SDN is the right candidate for Ericsson.