The SDN network as a competitive advantage

While service providers such as AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon have long touted the capabilities of their networks, many of the large Web-scale providers are now openly disclosing their internally developed network designs.

Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and others have invested heavily in Software Defined Networking both in their data centers and their wide area networks (WAN), and many have published details about their home-grown SDN software and white box switch implementations. In fact, achieving high performance, massive scale and low latency is now an arms race for the hyperscale cloud providers.

What differentiates hyperscale SDN networks is their scale, performance, reliability and their provisioning/management requirements. Web-scale organizations are truly massive in the scale of their compute and storage capacity. Their data centers typically range in size from 250,000 square feet to more than 500,000 square feet (larger than a typical Walmart store) and house 100,000 to 500,000+ physical servers.

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