Let’s keep this Monday rolling with another highlighted TFI2014 speaker: Recep Ozdag

Recep Ozdag is Director of Solutions Marketing for SDN and NFV at Cyan Inc. Before joining Cyan, Recep was in product marketing for the Communications and Storage Infrastructure Group (CSIG) at Intel. He lead Intel’s SDN switch and router marketing efforts as well as launched Intel’s SDN and NFV initiative; the Open Network Platform.

Prior to this role he was a design manager at Fulcrum Microsystems and has been involved in all of the commercial products that came out of the fabless semiconductor startup. Recep was one of the influential designers of the world’s lowest latency, highest bandwidth and SDN optimized switch silicon – the FM6000 Alta, which led to the Intel acquisition in 2011.

Recep is also part of the faculty within the engineering department at USC, where he occasionally teaches graduate level courses. He co-authored the book titled “A Designer’s Guide to Asynchronous VLSI”.
Recep Ozdag has received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California and his MBA from the University of California Los Angeles.

As we’ve done with many of our other esteemed speakers so far, we asked Recep to answer some questions to get us all thinking ahead of the event this Friday:

What is SDN?

In short, disaggregation of software from networking devices and improved multi-vendor interoperability captures the essence of what SDN represents.

Software-defined networking had its birth in the data-center and now extends into the WAN. SDN controllers for WANs have emerged, enabling network virtualization across multiple-vendors, multi-layer management and visualization, constraint-based path computation – or, in the simplest of terms, transformed the WAN into a programmable resource that enables on-demand connectivity between users and their applications.

The reality is, true service delivery relies on configuring and managing multiple domains that consist of a diverse set of physical and virtual resources, networks and small and large distributed data centers that may belong to service providers or users such as enterprises. With SDN, we are able to decouple the control and intelligence from proprietary devices and able to use white box hardware with modular and interoperable, intelligent software, thereby giving control and visibility back to the users.

Why are you excited about SDN?

Today network operators provision services piece-meal across their networks, one hop or node at a time, without end-to-end visibility or coordination. Adding yet another dimension of complexity is that often times different network layers are operationally siloed. This makes it impossible for an operator to make path computation decisions across a multi-layer service offering.

Yet, service providers and network operators around the world need to transform their operational models to drive faster growth, lower costs, and to offer services that meet end-customer requirements for dynamic network control

So how do network operators solve this? Especially in an environment where most large network operators are challenged by issues such as network size, the number of vendors in the network, and incomplete inventory systems.

SDN promises to make networks easier to use, turn them into a resource pool, and make them programmable. This in turn takes knowledge; knowledge about the network topology, knowledge about the inventory and state, and knowledge about the network layers and their relationships. When equipped with this meta-data about a network, a controller can help reap the promise of SDN.

The benefits include the ability to visualize, monitor and troubleshoot services from end-to-end over across multiple network domains, over multiple layers of network technologies, and through multiple vendors’ equipment. These service automation efforts enable the acceleration of service management, delivery, and provisioning and are a strategic step toward a software-defined network.

The result is services that are provisioned in minutes or hours instead of months. Errors are reduced. Time to market and revenue is greatly accelerated. These are all benefits the industry can all understand.

How does the network of the future differ from today’s?

In the near future, services will increasingly become cloud-centric workloads. Starting in data centers (DC) and at the network edges – networking services, capabilities, and business policies will be instantiated as needed over this common infrastructure. Such an approach will be embodied by orchestrating software instances that can be composed to perform similar tasks at various scale and reliability using techniques typical of cloud software architecture.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) will be common place and services will be delivered as virtual machines running on COTS servers spread over CEs, PoPs, COs and at central locations. Beyond reducing dependency on dedicated hardware-based appliances, virtualizing network functions also greatly reduces the complexity associated with introducing new services across the entire network.

Any network function that has not been virtualized will be implemented in a white box fashion from optical switches to core routers all the way to top-of-the-rack switches.

Register now to join Recep and all of our other SDN/NFV experts this Friday at The Future of the Internet 2014: Defining Software Defined Networks!