Chapter 8 – SDN in the Data Center

Chapter 8 delves more deeply into data center networking technology, both as it exists today and as it will adapt in the future through the benefit of SDN. More than most mainstream deployments, the modern data center has stretched traditional networking to the breaking point. In this chapter we define and describe the modern data center and examine the needs, technologies, and use cases specific to this challenging environment. Data center needs include dealing with MAC address table overflow and VLAN exhaustion, multitenancy, traffic engineering, and path efficiency, among others. We provide details of how new tunneling and path technologies are applied in the data center. We discusses specific use cases that illustrate how the three main SDN alternatives of Open SDN, SDN via APIs, and SDN via Hypervisor-based Overlays make use of those technologies to address the requirements of the data center. We conclude by listing how some major enterprises are using SDN today in their data center environments.