Software-defined networking after years of staying in the shadows is having its moment under the sun in 2012. The sale of Nicira has only increased the glare around the software-based networking trend. But this is just the start, argues Contrail CEO Ankur Singla, who until recently was Chief Technology Officer and VP of engineering at Aruba Networks. His co-founders in the company are  Pedro Marques who was at Google (and was a distinguished engineer at Cisco and Juniper) and Harshad Nakil, who in his past life was the lead architect for routing and switching platforms at Cisco. “I think there has been very little innovation in large systems and software defined data centers,” said Vinod Khosla, who led the investment in the company. Contrail is going to  attack ”the cost/performance standards typical of traditional vendors” he added.

How? Contrail is building a federated and standards-based virtualized network control solution that is OpenStack enabled, which  is likely to come to market in 2013.  It will join a crowded field – Nicira, Big Switch and IBM are some of the players in the “controller” market — and more will emerge.

Singla says that Contrail’s approach is different from its competitors because it is both more distributed and can interoperate with a greater variety of equipment because it uses both BGP and XMPP protocols. Singla is of the opinion that large enterprises such as big financial institutions and energy companies will need their own web-scale cloud in order to run data-heavy custom applications. “The future is having any app or any workload run anywhere in the data center and that means that the network has to be very fungible,” said Singla. (VMware is a believer in this software-defined datacenter.)

In other words a network that is both virtualized and programmable. It is not as easy as it sounds, mostly because of the closed nature of systems at work, Singla said. Just as Cisco embraced BGP in its routers and was followed by others routers makers and led to decentralized routing and thus allowing Internet to become a totally decentralized system, what Contrail is proposing is a new standard that is based on BGP and L3VPN. In order to inter-operate, all they have to do is get a buy-in from their peers.

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Verizon and  CenturyLink set off the race when they snapped up Terremark and Savvis, respectively. Equinix, Interxion Holding, Joyent, Rackspace and SoftLayer Technologies are considered as some of the likely targets. Internap, which until recently was in the business of providing interconnections and co-location services, started offering data center services and that has made it a likely target, analysts say.

“We believe Internap represents a compelling buy as it operates defensive telecom businesses with solid growth prospects, has no debt and the recent drop in the stock,” Clayton Moran, an analyst at The Benchmark Co, told Reuters.

Don’t believe the hype, says Internap CEO Eric Cooney. He told Reuters:

‘I am not shopping the company and we listen to any offers that come in and respond accordingly. … At this stage the best value for our shareholders is to continue executing our organic growth plan. … Increasingly we will look much more like Rackspace, Savvis or Terremark did before they got acquired, in terms of revenue and profitability growth.’

Image courtesy of Internap.

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“Energy efficiency and cost is driving everything we do in cloud computing,” said Partha Ranganathan, distinguished technologist for HP. Speaking on a panel at the GigaOM Structure conference, Ranganathan pointed to the massive potential yet to be found in the cloud through low-powered devices. “Today’s cellphones have as much computing power as NASA had in the 1960′s. They launched a rocket to the moon and we’re launching pigs and birds,” he said, referring to the popular Angry Birds game.

Anant Agarwal, co-founder and CTO of Tilera Corporation agreed. “Datacenters use hundreds of megawatts of power because they’re build upon desktop processors. We can do 100 times better with specific cloud processors that have many cores in a chip but don’t have other features not needed for cloud computing.” Agarwal suggested that processors are still the bottleneck in cloud services because bandwidth is plentiful and fast while memristors are providing cheaper, non-volatile memory. But there’s still an issue of software, according to Jason Hoffman, founder and chief scientist of Joyent.

“Software is a million times worse than it needs to be,” Hoffman said, mainly because there’s no software platform for the cloud itself. Agarwal suggests an OSaaS or Operating System as a Service to address this issue. “Operating systems today are really good for a single computer,” he said. “Cloud apps require systems programmers, however, to deal with load balancing, databases and more.” And as computing has come down in price, it has “allowed software to be sloppy,” said Agarwal.

What will overcoming of these challenges bring? The panelists used the example of how today’s high-end luxury cars examine hundreds of data points to determine if the driver is falling asleep. Scaling such computation to the “world as a giant computer” will lead to new interactions with computers, services and even people. Instead of using the cloud for simple voice searches as we do today on smartphones, tomorrow’s cloud will be able to interpret our gestures, expressions and even our current health stats. That sounds great, but if it doesn’t pan out, we can always use a cheap desktop with an sensor-filled Kinect.

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