It is very important to understand why open source networking started and how it has grown to its current size.
Networking professionals always used to rely on rigid appliances to perform networking functions such as routing, firewalling, switching, and load balancing. We have seen the IT virtualization transformation for servers. We have used those technologies and become familiar with servers and storage virtualization.
Do you remember the server virtualization evolution back in 2000? By that time, we didn’t know that server virtualization will become mainstream and we will have a fully virtualized environment running enterprise applications. Server specialists used to have server hardware appliances with 2, 4 or 8 processors, a single operating system running a single application or, in some rare cases, multiple applications if they could.
Once virtualization technology became reliable, and server virtualization emerged, enterprises and other industries started migrating the physical servers into virtual servers. Currently, more than 80% of applications are being served on a virtual environment.
Next, a similar revolution also happened to the storage industry. Storage specialists used to have storage and massive disk arrays taking care of storing data and presenting file- or block-based storage to servers. Storage virtualization created another revolution by introducing distributed filesystems and bringing storage closer to the server, where it could use a JBOD (Just Bunch Of Disks) and convert them to a very highly available and robust storage system. Many new storage virtualization products and vendors appeared on the market, and are now driving the future of the storage market.
If we look at the revolution of both server and storage virtualization, they both have something in common: they have disaggregated the hardware and software to provide agile and flexible systems.
This evolution in networking has been slower because most of the network appliances had a fully integrated hardware and software. Similar to other electronic appliances, a network device is also based on a separate hardware and software which, in most cases, are integrated in a single motherboard.
