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.