Chapter 17. Software-Defined Networks

As networks have become both more crucial to business operations and more complex to operate, they have also become expensive to build and manage. This combination of realities has led the network world to seek solutions beyond the network management and protocol realms, specifically in a concept called the Software-Defined Network (SDN). In this chapter, we’ll begin with a discussion of what an SDN is, and present one specific taxonomy, or method of classifying SDNs. After this, we’ll discuss some business cases for SDNs.

Understanding SDNs

What, precisely, is an SDN? What sort of framework can we use to understand how an SDN works and what it does? This section is one set of answers to these two fundamental ...

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