Control and Management Planes - a new interpretation

In three consecutive blog posts on RAD's site I present a distinctive way of interpreting recent trends in networking. In Part 1 I recall the history of the logical separation of a network’s operation into three planes - the forwarding plane, the control plane, and the management plane. In Part 2 I explain how SDN’s physical separation of forwarding from control is different, and amplify on the relationship between the conventional control and management planes and SDN’s merged control plane. In Part 3 I analyze SDN’s concept of a whitebox switch from the point of view of distributed computation, and conclude that the SDN world view is fundamentally incompatible with the conventional way of specifying SLA’s, which requires the trade-off ability of centralized management and distributed control planes.