Wireless networks have a tendency to develop in an ad hoc fashion and there is a danger businesses will not have the management tools to know when there are rogue access points on their estate or to see where the Wi-Fi signal is going. This presents an opportunity for partners to go out and explain how customers can get more control by investing in their wireless networks to add management and security. There is a requirement for centralised security and network access control to determine who the user is, what he or she is allowed to do and to apply the policy to the user. Partners have a very strong opportunity to deliver a more sophisticated wireless solution than just providing access points with fairly limited security.
“Management is another area partners should focus on, as they have the opportunity to wrap a managed service around storage arrays for customers and to actively manage and move their requirements around arrays” – John Casey, Trilogy Technologies
Resellers are very well-positioned to educate customers on the potential benefits and pitfalls associated with wireless technologies. Yet again, they are in the unique position of trusted advisors able to add value to a business by assessing the existing technology and providing an in-depth understanding of the company’s goals and what it is trying to achieve.
In addition, they can sell technical support, installation and integration services, along with services like training, education, management and monitoring of the network to ensure it runs to its maximum effect.
Software-defined-everything
‘Software defined’ is a means of extending the benefits of virtualisation to storage, networking or (the ultimate objective) the data centre. Virtualisation at the compute level (or should that be software defined compute) has proven to be the catalyst for software defined storage (SDS) because most storage solutions have been unable to cope with the increased workload density virtualisation has created.
Along with the emergence of upstart software vendors like Nexenta, Atlantis Computing, DataCore Software, CloudByte and Maxta, the likes of EMC, HP, IBM, NetApp and Hitachi have all jumped onto the SDS bandwagon. Software defined networking (SDN) is also starting to happen. Jim Smith, outside sales specialist for Dell Networking, believes that “widespread adoption of SDN is happening” through the use of the OpenFlow protocol to control networks within data centres and it was being driven by user communities, not equipment manufacturers.
Damien Saunders, head of Citrix’s cloud networking group argues SDN is “at a pivotal moment in time. There’s been a lot of discussion and people are beginning to deploy this stuff in anger. SDN is a broad brush and it’s a multi-layered challenge”. He warns customers do not see SDN as “the only way” and predicts a hybrid model will emerge because they have large investments in traditional physical networks and security.
It is a sign of how far software defined has progressed from the compute layer that analysts now refer to the concept of “Software-defined Anything (SDx)” to encompass SDS, SDN and the SDDC. The IEEE Computer Society has identified SDx as one of the top ten technological trends for 2015. “Driven by automation and DevOps, SDx takes network centralisation and virtualisation, and especially network control, into the cloud,” it argues. “Similar to the smartphone ecosystem, software-defined networking’s programmability will turn various network appliances into a warehouse of apps.”
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