SDN and NFV in the CDN Industry

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After months of research and analysis on the SDN (Software-Defined Networking) market, the Bizety team is adding SDN as an area of focus, complimenting our Cyber Security CDN research. More specifically, we’ll discuss how SDN and NFV will impact the CDN Ecosystem and all of its players. SDN technology is just a few years old, yet there is an incredible amount of research available on SDN. However, when it comes to SDN+CDN there is very little research on the subject. Therefore, from this day forward we’ll share our insight and ideas on how SDN will impact the CDN Ecosystem.

The State of the SDN Market

According to IDC, the SDN market is set to grow from $960M in 2014 to $8B in 2018. The SDN industry is an infancy and networking giants like Cisco are fiercely battling start-ups like Big Swith, in order to establish the SDN standards for the next decade. At the same time, each participant in the SDN sector seeks to promote their own agenda, and ensure their company survives in the long haul. Cisco, Big Switch, Juniper and many others are not only promoting their own proprietary SDN solutions, but they are also participating and contributing software code to the open source SDN projects.

Two well known open source SDN projects are “OpenDaylight Project” and “Project Floodlight“. OpenDaylight is the largest open source SDN project on the planet that is being led by Cisco and others. Project Floodlight is a smaller open source project that is gaining traction, and is being led by Big Switch and others. SDN is already impacting many different industries including networking manufacturers, global carriers and CDNs.

Industries Impacted by SDN

  • Network Manufacturers: Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel & others
  • Global carriers:  Level 3 and Telefonica (amongst many) are testing different flavors of SDN in their network
  • CDNs: Fastly, CloudFlare, Akamai and others

 CDNs using Some form of SDN

  • Fastly is using Arista Networks
  • CloudFlare is using Pluribus Networks
  • Akamai has partnered with Juniper to offer virtual CDN to service providers (telcos) for VOD delivery
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