Last Thursday (August 23 2012), I had the honor of moderating the panel: SDN Fad or Phenom? at the Hot Interconnection Conference hosted by Huawei in Santa Clara, California. With a fantastic set of panelists from Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, HP, IBM, and Juniper. In addition to a spirited debate -- each panelist had 5 minutes to present their views on SDN. In another SDxCentral exclusive, we have the slides from each panelist available to our community. Learn more about the panel and panelist below.

SDN - Fad or Phenom?

Two decades of 'closed' switch and router designs have led to networking R&D 'ossification', possibly constraining the academic and startup innovation. The advent of SDN, virtual overlays and OpenFlow in the context of datacenter networking (DCN) now challenges the status-quo with new designs and players.

Once every generation conflicting forces churn a field, triggering opportunities for innovation and re-adjusting the balance of power, e.g: Is SDN and/or OpenFlow becoming the Linux of networking? Is SDN equivalent with OF? Should their APIs be standardized - or let the market decide? How can we build 1M-node DCNs with centralized controls? What's the impact of SDN and OF on the highly optimized PoDs, vs. the generic vendor fabric? Is the pendulum over-swinging from distributed towards centralized? How about expectations management?

VMware's pending acquisition of Nicira only add fuels to this hype filled topic. Today we'll hear from a number of industry luminaries with their views as to the future of networking. Including:

• Kireeti Kompella CTO and Chief Architect, Juniper Networks
• David Meyer Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems
• Jeff Mogul HP Labs Fellow,
• Vijoy Pandey IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Network OS
• Dimitri(os) Stiliadis Senior Director with Alcatel-Lucent

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About the panelists:

Kireeti Kompella
Kireeti Kompella is CTO and Chief Architect, Junos at Juniper Networks. His responsibiities include nurturing Junos on all Juniper platforms while exploring new horizons for Junos. His current interests are all things datacenter, especially scaling, and SDN. His previous interests included Packet Transport and large-scale MPLS. Dr. Kompella is active at the internet engineering task force (IETF) where he was a co-chair of the CCAMP Working Group and is the author of several Internet Drafts and RFCs in the areas of CCAMP, IS-IS, L2VPN, MPLS, OSPF, TE and NVO3. He specializes in Layer 2 VPNs, Metro Ethernet, Virtual Private LAN Service, and the use of MPLS in access networks and mobile backhaul. Even further back, he worked in the area of filesystems at Network Appliance and SGI; and earlier still in security and cryptography.

Dr. Kompella received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur; and his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California.

David Meyer

David Meyer is currently a Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems, where he works on future directions for Internet technologies. He has been a member of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) of the the IETF (www.IETF.org), co-chair of the SPEERMINT working, and chair of the MBONED, MSDP, and DNSOP working groups. He is also a member of several IETF directorates and IRTF research groups. He is also active in the operator community, and is a long standing member of the NANOG (www.nanog.org) program committee. He is also active in other standards organizations such as ANSI T1X1, the Open networking foundation (ONF), and the ITU-T. He is also active in the OpenFlow/SDN community and is an active member of the ONF.

Prior to joining Cisco, he served as Senior Scientist, Chief Technologist and Director of IP Technology Development at Sprint. He is also Director of the Advanced Network Technology Center at the University of Oregon. Prior to working at Sprint, he worked at Cisco, where he was involved in software development, working both on multicast and BGP. One of his major projects at the University of Oregon is routeviews (see www.routeviews.org).

Jeff Mogul

Jeff Mogul is an HP Labs Fellow, a Fellow of the ACM, and is currently doing research on SDN and cloud data-center networks. In his spare time, he serves on too many program committees, including this month's HotSDN workshop.

Vijoy Pandey 

Vijoy Pandey is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Network OS. He leads the architecture team within IBM System Networking. He has over 15 years of experience in research, design and development of networks and systems. Vijoy has worked in the areas of data center virtualization, cloud storage and highly scalable and fault-tolerant architectures. He has been an active member in IEEE 802.1 standards work. Vijoy holds a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from the University of California in the area of wireless networking.

Dimitrios Stiliadis

Dimitri(os) Stiliadis is currently a Senior Director with the IP Division of Alcatel-Lucent. In this capacity, he is leading strategic projects in the areas of cloud computing and software defined networking. Before that, he was the head of the Computer Systems Research Department in Bell Laboratories where he led research efforts in the areas of distributed computing and energy efficiency. He also served as the CTO of the Mobile Security Division of Alcatel-Lucent. His current interests are in distributed system design, and security. During his career he has made several fundamental contributions in the areas of computer architectures, traffic management, and data networking, and he was instrumental in the commercialization of these technologies.

Dimitrios received his Ph.D. and MS Degrees in Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1996 and 1994 respectively. Before that he received the Diploma in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece. He is the author of more than 50 papers in international conferences and journal and is the co-recipient of the 1998 IEEE Freed. W. Elersick Prize Paper Award.