The market share of 80 % or more covered by similar vendors [Networking Giants] making heavy RnS product gear for such a long time, made this field closed for innovation. However Open industry targeting inter-network products finally resulting in the form of OpenFlow or Software defined networks would be more definitive.
The central idea of SDN revolves around minimizing the use of Control Plane in every switch, instead taking the Control out from every switch to the centralized ‘Controller’ responsible for making decisions, and the Switch responsible for forwarding the flow, like inter-vlan routing, ACL etc. This in turn helps in reducing the power consumption, heavy cost on switch manufacturing and making the networking products Open to small players as well i.e. start-ups from many people including Innovators. ;)
However my personal take on this would be, concerning towards the security? As if the decision is not made the direct first HOP and instead via Controller what would be the impact ? the Vulnerabilities? ONE added hop in decision making? i.e. It has to go via controller but for that hopefully caching is there that should make the flow reasonably fast. But as this whole Idea is in Beta phase, and I’m hopeful that they would address all such issues and make a better solution.
Though haven’t practically tested so my views are on assumptions and purely on theoretical material available to know the insight. This whole idea of making the Close Product line OPEN, I believe would not only make things better for Customers seeking a Cheap solution for RnS gear but also would give space to new/small players to jump in the industry.
