We're all hearing a lot about SDN, but usually it's discussed in the future tense!  Customers and vendors are promising major management and virtualization benefits, all of which will eventually be delivered by SDN.  Well, the good news is that SDN is becoming much more real every day!  For example, Juniper has supported programmable network elements (switches and routers) that can communicate with an SDN Controller for over a year.  These have been successfully deployed in several large-scale enterprise and cloud networks. However, the controllers have always been home-grown application-specific platforms.

Contrail Overview from the Enterprise Networks Solutions YouTube Channel

The last piece of the SDN solution is a scalable, standards-based open-system controller.  Juniper released a controller (also available as a free open source application) known as Contrail last week.  This white paper describes this solution.  While the paper looks closely at Juniper's platform, it also describes some of the general challenges and architectural issues (with excellent diagrams) associated with SDN controllers. These principles are consistent and applicable, regardless of the particular manufacturer of the controllers.

Enterprise Networks Solutions is excited to get some hands on experience with the Juniper SDN solution, so hopefully over the next few months we'll have the opportunity to dive in.  Keep checking back for more updates as we learn more...