That SDN could forever change the way that enterprise IT organizations plan, manage and evolve their networks goes without saying. But much of that thinking and the lion’s share of the development of OpenFlow-based capabilities still takes place among that segment of the IT community focused on the data center. Discussion of SDN-enabling the access edge, and specifically the wireless LAN (WLAN) has until very recently been left out.
Those who have sought to address it largely fall into two camps: academics and others who only broach it to expand the still data center-focused dialog, and a very few vendors who wish to exploit the information exposed through application vendor APIs for their own closed purposes.
Existing unified access management platforms are costly and closed, providing visibility and control of LAN switching as well as WLAN controllers and access points, but typically only when you purchase the entire solution from a single vendor. Working to protect that “lock-in,” some WLAN vendors who claim support for SDN are actually doing much less. Taking the information exposed by application vendors’ “SDN APIs” and using it to their own advantage – optimizing performance of those applications without enabling any additional management of their controllers and access points – is an ineffective SDN implementation.
Only by enabling full visibility into and control over their networks, from the LAN switch, through the WLAN controller to the access points themselves, can WLAN vendors truly deliver on the promise of SDN. To add value to IT and their end users, WLAN vendors must provide north- and southbound APIs that are not vendor-specific. This give IT organizations the ability to integrate third-party or even “home-grown” management applications that meet their specific needs.
Appearing at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) this week and throwing our hat into the SDN ring for the first time, Meru is taking an altogether new place in the industry-wide dialog on SDN-enablement of the access edge. Unlike others, our approach is to truly embrace the open community approach to SDN, enabling northbound and southbound APIs in all of our solutions, and enabling the type of collaboration and control that organizations like the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) and the broader OpenFlow community have always had in mind.
We are starting today with demonstrations at ONS of a few key functions for critical applications – Microsoft performance optimization for Microsoft Lync as well as unified wired and wireless intrusion prevention, but soon you will see much more. By taking a truly open approach to SDN, we are working to help ensure the consistently high application performance for voice and video, along with the transparency and simplicity of management across unified wired and wireless networks that will help IT ensure the highest quality experiences for their end users now and in the future.
For more on Meru’s approach to SDN, see my article “SDN-Enabling The WLAN,” published today in InformationWeek: http://ubm.io/MI04l5
Also, watch this space for additional detail. There’s more to come, very soon.
