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.
In DCO there is a statistical advantage to SDNs with near 100% port utilization that is definitely advantageous. Although high (port) utilization was possible with VLANs, SDN extends the concept beyond Layer 2 virtual networking to IP, MPLS, and now even PBB tags and labels. But port utilization will not fundamentally alter the economics of transit and access networks because port utilization is not based on (application and network) convergence and high densities. Port utilization in access and transport networks is instead based on geographic density which SDN offers no benefit nor (nor does it claim to).
Far from being a "leveler" SDN is likely to increase the barrier to entry for CSPs as it increases the capital, engineering, and development costs in the immediate future.
Where SDN levels the field is not for CSPs, but instead for applications. Whereas the construction of VPNs and other network operations have sometimes been required to support novel network applications, SDN offers (but by no means guarantees) the potential for rapid deployment of flow based alternative models of network operations. It's hard to say (outside the data center) what the "killer app" for SDN will be -- if there are sufficent improvements in and investment in the technology -- it is possible that broadcast could become a killer app, but many technologies have tried to conquer broadcast over packet switched networks and failed primarily because of inter-AS challenges.
I just don't see the evidence that SDN levels anything for CSPs. I don't see little players benefiting from SDN. If anything it appears the opposite is true, the technology threatens to display big players with bigger players.
One thing is certain. SDN is not "simpler" than "legacy" distributed IP and Ethernet technologies in any way. Because the technology must be backwards compatible it is 100% as complex as what is deployed now plus the addition of numerous layers of complexity. Adding layers of complexity doesn't decrease cost (aka lower the barrier to entry). It raises it. Does it increase flexibility -- yes it could -- it might -- if the OSS modifications can be made. But history tells us this is a long and costly process.