June 2014
Intermediate to advanced
352 pages
12h 32m
English
Chapter 2 describes the technical context that spawned the need for SDN. We continue the discussion on the evolution of switches and control planes begun in Chapter 1, providing additional technical details. The traditional distributed control plane has failed to scale to the size and complexity of many modern deployments. This chapter explains that this failure stems from a number of reasons. The most important are 1) simple technical inability to handle the size of the modern mega-data centers, 2) the elevated costs of networking equipment as compared to other equipment in the data center, and 3) a disconnect between the rate of innovation in the areas of compute and storage virtualization as compared to networking. ...