According to data growth statistics, over the coming years we will experience a tremendous jump in data generation and consumption. Cisco forecasts that global cloud traffic is expected to grow 4.5-fold. That amounts to a 35% CAGR -- from 1.2 zettabytes of annual traffic in 2012, to 5.3 zettabytes by 2017. Overall, Cisco expects global data center traffic will grow threefold and reach a total of 7.7 zettabytes annually by 2017.
If those numbers seem impressive, consider that IDC estimates that the Internet of Everything will amount to an $8.9 trillion market in 2020. To co-ordinate IDC's estimated 212-billion things, data centers will need to shoulder the burden. This clearly puts the onus on networks to support the enormous volume of data that is being transmitted across channels. As customers' demand for bandwidth increases, there is a need for a strong network infrastructure at the back-end and intelligent devices to minimize the service latency and support this data growth.
Within this context, SDN is likely to reshape the telecom industry in new and interesting ways. Telco CTOs/CIOs worldwide are facing enormous pressure on IT spending, which will have an impact on their SDN strategy. However, they cannot ignore the tremendous benefits SDN would bring in terms of agility, flexibility and cost savings (both capex and opex), as enterprises are shifting from physical infrastructure to cloud based infrastructure.
Reducing costs and improving network efficiency
With SDN, carriers can increase the flexibility and manageability of their networks, helping to deliver bandwidth where and when customers need it with a (more) self-serve model. Operators can potentially improve both their network flexibility to improve customer value, while also reducing the high operational costs of supporting OTT providers such as Google, Amazon and Skype, which otherwise could challenge carriers' ability to grow their revenues and affect their margins.
SDN would provide the bandwidth flexibility that will give carriers the edge they need to successfully deliver a range of cloud-based services. In particular, SDN will help carriers to:
Building bolder business models with SDN and NFV
SDN with NFV offers a way for CSPs to break out of their established, inflexible business models. CSPs can develop flexible models that are based on tiered services and on elastic services (e.g. security-as-a-service, unified communications-as-a-service, etc.) They can also pay network equipment providers on a per-use basis for network functions as needed, as opposed to capital expenditure tied to under-utilized equipment.
The SDN-driven environment will not only help incumbent providers become more agile and able to adapt to market trends and subscriber demands more effectively, but will open up the market to Tier 2 and Tier 3 players that may not have had the deep pockets needed to develop proprietary hardware. It will allow new carriers to quickly scale and compete, as they won't have to load up on costly central office equipment to get started.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 CSPs will benefit from:
The early bird gets the worm
SDN adoption is still in its infancy. While some carriers have realised early adoption can substantially benefit their organization, others are taking a cautious approach due to the capex required and the negative impact on the company's competitiveness associated with the immature product. Yet as the technology matures, we see most operators turning to SDN to protect their future and benefit from lower cost of operations, new revenue streams and strengthened network services. Failure to plan for SDN now, could put CSPs at risk tomorrow.
— Ravi Kumar Palepu, Head of Telco Solutions, Virtusa Corp.
I absolutely agree that opex is a huge factor. I thought that was my principal point, that SDN doesn't show any promise of reducing opex in the short or mid-term because it adds complexity and requires a huge (operational) cost of deploying and integrating new technology, training, etc.
All of that is with the promise of greater network flexibility in the future. The truth is that today's IP networks are very flexible. All of the applications we've dreamt up can and do work on it. As I said, there are a lot of reasons to want to virtualize networks for various marketing, security, or other virtualized needs. These were osentensibly the driving factors to create SDN.
But I think everyone is still hard pressed to say "here is something we cannot do with IP today." Or as you argue perhaps too difficult to do with IP today. An example of that might be VRFs/VPLS which is largely manual today. So I get how SDN can potentially automate that. But as I said, there are huge chunks of work missing that would be required to do that because today the ONF specs give us just flow tables without distributed decision making required for security and many applications.
Even when it is done, I expect that opex will not decline, it will rise with the complexity. Today the SDN platforms require way more work to deploy than off the shelf Ethernet/IP gear. You have to install an OS, patches, and then the SDN/ONF app, then tools, all just to configure a controller -- which still doesn't give you an operational network. You then need interop between the controller and the device, etc.
I think we (all ?) agree that SDN holds great potential to accellerate application development for service providers who want to be in the mix. But the change isn't just one for sp's -- its about SPs and apps working together and that isn't going to reduce any costs at all. It is going to raise cost and complexity -- albeit with perhaps some fascinating benefits to application performance, etc. And those will likely be worth it. But going in thinking it is going to reduce $ seems to ignore both history and reality as it stands.