NFV with SDN – Tech Talks, PoCs and Demos

At last week’s NFV World Congress event in San Jose, we got a closer look at what operators want from NFV and where it intersects with SDN. Here we share highlights from a range of keynotes and tutorials to summarize their perspectives on how these two technologies complement each other.

SDN Control & Orchestration

AT&T distinguished architect and OPNFV president Margaret Chiosi gave a presentation detailing AT&T’s model for implementing SDN. A key highlight in the talk was the explanation of how AT&T categorized different types of SDN controllers.

Figure 1: From ‘SDN+NFV Next Steps in the Journey’, Margaret Chiosi, NFV World Congress 2015

There has been much speculation about how, as SDN grows to maturity, what controller architectures will become common? How will the various different types of controllers compete, or how will they work together? The model presented by Chiosi brings a lot of clarity to this issue.  I should note that the categorization shown here is an example of how controllers can work together, but should not imply that these controllers are designed for these categories, this is one possible implementation. The key point is that SDN will impact a vast array of use cases and for any number of them it may make sense to leverage specialized controllers, showing how different open source and commercial controllers can work together to solve key operator challenges.