Software-Based Switching Is not SDN

Russ White made an excellent remark while discussing the news that the CloudRouter pushed 650 Gbps through commodity hardware: “If this is software defined networking, then we’ve been doing this since sometime in the 1990’s, perhaps even earlier…

He’s absolutely right – the first routers (like AGS or IGS from Cisco) did all packet forwarding in software, so as I explained during the Introduction to SDN webinar while reaching dozens of gigabits with software-based packet forwarding is exciting, calling it SDN doesn’t make much sense.

1 comments:

  1. I always start out any explanation of SDN with:

    "Back in the 1990s, we came up with this protocol called RADIUS..."
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