pour one out for the NSF folks. RIP </3
> The investments NSF made in SDN over the past two decades have paid huge dividends.
In my view this seems a little overblown. The general idea of separation of control and data plane is just that - an idea. In practice, none of the early firms (like Nicira) have had any significant impact on what's happening in industry. Happy to be corrected if that's not accurate!
Well you failed horribly.
> The project brought together researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley, and AT&T.
I think I see why.
> This research led to the 4D architecture for logically centralized network control of a distributed data plane
What? How was this meant to benefit citizens?
> Datacenter owners grew frustrated with the cost and complexity of the commercially available networking equipment; a typical datacenter switch cost more than $20,000 and a hyperscaler needed about 10,000 switches per site. They decided they could build their own switch box for about $2,000 using off-the-shelf switching chips from companies such as Broadcom and Marvell
What role did the NSF play here? It sounds like basic economics did most of the actual work.
> The start-up company Nicira, which emerged from the NSF-funded Ethane project, developed the Network Virtualization Platform (NVP)26 to meet this need
Which seems to have _zero_ mentions outside of academic papers.
Nicira or NVP?
I remember working on related projects about ten years ago in grad school, and even back then it felt like a somewhat naive and overhyped form of “engineering innovation.”
Take OpenFlow, for example — every TCP connection had to go through the controller to set up a per-connection flow match entry for the path. It always struck me as a bit absurd.
At the time, the main push came from Stanford’s “clean slate” networking project led by Prof. Nick McKeown. They spun off things like Open vSwitch, Big Switch Networks, and even open-source router efforts like NetFPGA. Later, the professor went back into industry.
Looking back, the whole movement feels like a startup-driven experiment that got heavily “packaged” but never really solved any fundamental problem. I mean, traditional distributed-routing-based network gear was already working fine — didn’t they already have admin interfaces for configuration anyway (or call that admin interface SDN )? lol ~
Animats•5h ago
Including a backdoor for wiretapping in SDN-enabled routers.
blackmanta•3h ago
acdha•2h ago