Why creation of SDN standards is important for India

At a time when the concept of software driven networking or SDN is challenging the traditional hardware based networking, there is SDN adoption happening in the enterprise community at the global level. And with a huge number of students working in the technology domain, India stands to gain big benefits from this by contributing towards creation of SDN standards.

Speaking during the recently held Telecom Summit at Convergence India 2014, Prof. SV Raghavan, Scientific Advisor to the Government of India said that India has the world’s biggest knowledge network in the form of NKN (National Knowledge Network and it is ideally poised to contribute towards creation of such standards.

“We already have the world’s biggest knowledge network NKN – where we are connecting all the major research institutions. There is a big opportunity to create SDN standards for tomorrow which can create even bigger windows of opportunities for Indians,” he added.

The NKN is India’s multi-gigabit pan-India network which is used for providing a unified high speed network backbone for all knowledge related institutions in the country. This network enables scientists, researchers and students to work closely for advancing development in critical and emerging areas and create opportunities.

Over the past few years, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as an architecture that is carving new cost effective opportunities for the enterprise community, the SDN architecture is dynamic, can be better managed, and most importantly it is becoming more adaptable to drive an enterprise need for agility. All this is putting SDN, right at the helm of enterprise networking and helping them execute business applications in a dynamic manner.

The SDN architecture is putting software at the helm, rather than traditional networking scenario where hardware is quite central to the idea of networking. SDN decouples the network control and forwarding functions and this enables the network control to become more agile, directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted for applications and network services.

If India moves towards development of SDN standards, it can become an engine for a large number of Independent Software Vendors or ISVs in India to innovate on top of that standard and create value-add for their customers. Most importantly, the standards created in SDN architecture mean that no single vendor will control hardware or software direction- and will give enterprise customers much needed choice in their hands.

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