Stack them high [Software-defined networking]
Michael Courtney · Engineering & Technology · 2014
The networking industry is perhaps the last bastion of IT where old-fashioned barriers to entry continue to systematically and deliberately hold back innovation The networking equipment vendors have sold a crock to the world [saying] that open-standards lead to more innovation. In fact, they have cleverly used open-standards to drive complexity, cost and margins sky high, while resisting major innovation and change. That era, according to McKeown [professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University] and others surrounding the networking industry, is coming to a close. Through a series of changes to the architecture of the switches, routers and servers that direct voice calls, e-mails, Web traffic, video and everything else under the banner of software defined networking (SDN). The shift is away from single-purpose, custom-engineered hardware and towards highly programmable switches and servers. Thus software-defined networking promises cheaper, more flexible communications but is that winning over converts in the data centre.