Why Does Facebook Use SDN?

In a Cumulus Networks-sponsored webcast SDN panel on March 21, Najam Ahmad, Facebook’s director of technical operations, explained why the social networking website has embraced the open SDN model.

Ahmad said that when it comes to the reasons SDN makes sense for Facebook, it boils down to two key things: scale and agility. He noted that there is a lot of traffic going between machines today that runs over network infrastructure. In order to scale the network to meet the needs for increasing machine-to-machine traffic, the traditional hierarchy-based network structure isn’t a good fit.

“We need to be able to build architectures that are more horizontally scaling, so we can add capacity as we go along,” Ahmad said.

Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Why Facebook Does SDN

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.