While the impact of software defined networking (SDN) on the network infrastructure space is a continued subject of fascination for vendors in the area, many believe a large number of businesses, both here in Ireland and across the globe, are still unaware of its advantages or even in some cases its existence.
Cliff Grossner of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise said the subject has "eclipsed most discussions I’ve heard in the vendor community" over the last 12 months, noting that topics such as storage virtualisation within the data centre and automation of tasks also regularly crop up. However, SDN is down the pecking order for "most clients".
The SDN approach sees control disassociated from hardware and given to a software application generally called a controller, allowing for quick provision of network connections and giving administrators more control over network traffic flow than ever before. Giving the network more flexibility to keep up with developments in the cloud and fully utilising its capacity, it is obvious talking to industry experts that the possibilities are extremely exciting.
Logically centralised
HP Networking’s Irish country manager Raymond O’ Connor explained that in the SDN architecture, with control and data planes now decoupled, "network intelligence and state are logically centralised and the underlying network infrastructure is abstracted from the applications".
Moving back to the concerns of an under-educated public, Grossner said more often than not SDN is only brought up by a select few clients. When talking to companies such as "a large enterprise or maybe a cloud provider" SDN "tops the list of priorities" he said, whereas for others "it’s almost a ‘don’t care’" attitude.
Cisco’s Ian Foddering said though that while he "wouldn’t say it’s daily" that SDN is brought up by clients, it is "certainly coming up more and more". Interestingly, while talking about the recent Techwatch 2013 report from Cisco, which looked at "cloud trends and the next generation workspace", he noted how he had "put in a specific question about SDN in one survey".
Foddering, who is CTO and technical director for Cisco in Ireland and the UK, said he did this "because I found that there’s a lot of confusion around it in a very similar way to what we faced in the early days of cloud." He continued, "We asked how many of them already had SDN deployed and how many were thinking of deploying SDN in the next three years. What surprised me was that we had a response of over 20% of organisations, enterprise and SMEs across the UK and Ireland telling us that they had already deployed SDN.
"With all due respect to those individuals who completed that survey I think it’s unlikely to be that high at this stage as it’s still very early on in the evolution of the concept."
Physical infrastructure
Grossner said that for a lot of SMEs in particular, concern over their physical infrastructure is the "biggest problem on their minds". The director of strategic marketing added, "The only thing you need to do when you’re upgrading your physical infrastructure is be careful about the vendors you’re looking at. You have to make sure you examine if their SDN strategy might be something that could impact you in the future. But to be honest with you, for most customers that’s so far down the road. They’re just consumed with what to do with their physical infrastructure."
Of course the networking hardware industry is estimated to be a near-€30 billion market with every major vendor trying to remain in that space, so physical infrastructure will remain a source for much innovation yet. But as many experts including Arpit Joshipura, who is head of product marketing at Dell Force10, pointed out, SDN could cause serious ripples in terms of how that hardware is bought and sold from now on.
Joshipura is former chief marketing officer of Force10, a virtual network architecture company that was acquired by Dell in 2010. In similar moves over recent years VMWare acquired Nicira while last July Orcale picked up Xsigo Systems, a leading provider of network virtualisation technology.
"There are two technologies that have been at the forefront of industry conversations over the last year," said Joshipura. "One," he said, "is 40GB [connectivity speeds] in the data centre and how do you commercialise that, the other one is SDN." He would add that both will continue to dominate the network infrastructure conversation "for the next two years"
Agility and automation
HP’s O’Connor told ComputerScope that "education and understanding SDN and its relevance are key" in ensuring future take up. The idea, he said, "holds the potential to make our networks more responsive to business needs through agility and automation, the path that you take in deploying the technology can either open doors or cause you some technological or vendor lock-in".
Elsewhere, Agile Networks MD Darragh Richardson said network infrastructure vendors are "still uncertain and trying to create their own stamp on what SDN is and what it will mean to end users". Weighing up the possible effects he said, "Engineers will be dragged away from their beloved command line interfaces and will have to have a mind-shift into a new way of building networks. Networking devices will be broken apart and deployed differently to provide the flexibility to deliver services quicker and easier. This new way of thinking is also evident in vendors and they are developing their own unique software based networks."
Paul Phelan, CTO, Data Edge, said the impact on network infrastructure which SDN can bring will no doubt be felt all the more over the coming months. "SDN offers opportunities for both SMEs and large organisations," he said, "when it becomes widely deployed, all will start to notice a number of benefits." Phelan said this will include lower telecommunications service costs, as "operational overheads will be reduced" and new billing concepts, "moving away from a flat billing rate, to a daily or hourly bandwidth rate" are introduced.
Elsewhere, Phelan pointed to new stability the concept brings to a company’s network, noting that "if a fault occurs, the network has the improved ability to route data around the fault and find an alternate path, allowing faster self-repair and more resilient and redundant network architectures."
CONSORTIUM
With total cost of ownership to network operators reduced by the increased network lifecycles offered by SDN-achieved by the lower reliance on network hardware, allowing for faster and simpler upgrades-the advantages are there to be seen.
For SMEs, benefits may come in the shape of services they purchase from providers such as 4G LTE and superfast broadband now being based on SDN infrastructure, in turn leading to leading to improved quality of service with less disruption than previously encountered
So, with the concept allowing for cheaper, easier network management it is somewhat of a concern that the corporate market has yet to embrace it fully, a trend that led to Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and others recently creating a consortium called OpenDaylight to help kick-start the SDN marketplace.
"[OpenDaylight] is representative of how the market is evolving and needs to evolve," Cisco’s own Foddering told ComputerScope. "Where organisations are coming together and actually starting to build a comprehensive framework that allows organisations and clients to have confidence that they’re investing in a technology that isn’t excluding them as the marketplace evolves."
Dell Force10’s Joshipura meanwhile said the concept will work "if some of the leaders and vendors don’t push proprietary technologies". This was also vital for Data Edge’s Phelan who said the move is intriguing as "the application development sector has a fair share of development contribution and control". This, he said, is "hugely positive and historically quite unusual" as such networking-related technologies tend to be driven and controlled by the large network equipment manufacturers.
CONTROLLER
Looking towards the next year to 18 months in the network infrastructure space, Data Edge CTO Phelan returned once more to SDN development, believing more controller applications will be developed "using the controller reactive channel."
"I also think," said Phelan, "current industry standard applications such as billing, performance reporting and event and alarm mechanisms will be adapted to be compatible with SDN controller architecture. Within the next two years I think we will see large network providers deciding to adopt and roll out SDN."
A Huawei statement on the subject addressed the question in a similar manner, noting that "The next 18 months will see a realisation from the industry that current network design and infrastructure is unable to meet the demands of our customers".
"SDN technology itself is flexible by design," the statement added, "so technological advances will come in the form of new software rather than actual infrastructure. Over the next 18 months we expect there will be widespread adoption and a greater awareness of SDN technology in the industry."
Agile Network’s Richardson summed things up by saying the next year or so will be intriguing as the "open nature of the SDN network will also allow third parties to integrate their software into the main vendors’ software, allowing specialised applications to unlock the power of SDN". The company MD added, "Some vendors have been designing their software this way since their inception, so separating out their forwarding plane from their physical networking devices was a no-brainer."
High performance
Looking beyond SDN, HP Networking’s O’ Connor focused on how high speed, high-performance networking is accelerating "at a great pace". With switches on the market with 40GB uplink capability and 100GB-capable solutions arriving towards the end of 2013 it will be an intriguing area of development to watch.
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s Grossner felt that "optimisations based on automation will remove a lot of manual configuration complexities which today create a lot of errors and downtime" will be a focus for many innovators operating in the network infrastructure space. While Arpit Joshipura of Dell Force10 said that "the continuation of more tight integration of server, storage and compute as a building block" as opposed to looking at those three elements as separate strands of the network will be a major theme over the 12 months.
He added that with such developments in place it meant, "If a customer wants to buy compute blocks, they don’t need to worry about buying a switch, buying a rack, buying storage-it’s all prefabricated into a converged infrastructure."
Asked to look at the next year to 18 months of development, David Kinsella, senior technical lead with Datapac agreed that "wireless speeds and throughputs are set to explode over the coming years, and the expectation of pervasive wireless is getting closer". Noting that the 802.11ac wireless computer networking standard which is still under development within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) "is a faster more scalable version of [the] 802.11n [standard]". Kinsella hoped this could result in "wireless networks potentially offering Gigabit Ethernet like speeds".
"Networks that employ 802.11ac will be capable of handling more clients per access point (AP) and reduce the number of APs that would normally be required to service networks," he added. "Employees that carry several 802.11 devices that consume network bandwidth all at once will no longer be a threat to network performance."
Not secondary
Kinsella was also effusive about developments in terms of "unified access", which represents "a significant transition in campus networking". "The wireless network is no longer considered as a secondary overlay network. Due to the demands of BYOD the wireless network must be considered as a primary network, closely coupled to the fixed network.
"The wireless network must provide the same high level of performance, reliability, security and quality of service as the fixed network. Users will expect and demand the same secure high quality service irrespective of whether they are connected to the fixed network, wireless network or working remotely. The most effective way to meet this demand is to have a clear unified access strategy," added Kinsella, "a strategy that delivers a single network, which implements a single policy and which is managed from a single management application."
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