If the recent OpenStack Summit is any indication, virtual networking is a hot IT topic.
There could be a variety of reasons the topic seems to have piqued the interest of so many of the more than 1,400 attendees at this year’s show, with panel discussions featuring HP, Big Switch and Midokura and talks by engineers from eBay and Nicira about their software-defined networking implementations.
The latest release of OpenStack (Folsom), for the first time, has a virtual networking component named Quantum fully baked into the code as a core project.
The discussions have not just been about Quantum though, they have been focused more the idea that next-generation networking will be, if it isn’t already, an essential part of cloud computing in general.
"To get elasticity in the cloud, you need elasticity of the network." And SDN is the way to do that, says Boris Renski, co-founder of Mirantis, a company that helps enterprises deploy OpenStack-powered clouds.
Software defined networking (SDN) and virtual network technology are in their early days, admits Mike Cohen of Big Switch Networks, one of the growing number of vendors in this emerging landscape. So far, early adopters of SDN have been interested in the technology for two main reasons: First, virtualising the network by abstracting core networking functions from the underlying hardware inherently makes the data centre or network environment more efficient. It’s similar, Cohen says, to how server virtualisation made computing more efficient. Second, SDN allows networks to programmatically scale, providing much more agility in controlling the network.
These features have so far appealed most to service providers who are looking to scale virtual local area networks (VLAN) to create more segmented and secure multi-tenant environments, or by large enterprises that need to span different infrastructures but want to use the same networking topology.
For users, this ability to control multiple disparate sites under the same network control opens up one of the chief promises of cloud computing: elastic scaling of applications between an on-premise private cloud and a service’s provider’s public cloud, creating a hybrid cloud. An abstracted network makes that significantly easier, says Gavin Pratt of HP Cloud Services. This will become a necessity for enterprises truly embracing cloud computing, he says.
In the long term, even as cloud computing continues to popularise, many enterprises will not be comfortable having all of their workloads in the public cloud – they will still have on-premise applications. SDN allows users to be able to manage both of those networks through a common framework. "The implication is you will need a public cloud interconnected with the private cloud, to provide a flex-out capability," Pratt says. "To be able to do that within the same network is a huge opportunity."
SDN can be an opportunity to actually improve network security, too. "The SDN controller has a global view of the network," Cohen notes. That ubiquitous view, combined with the network intelligence being done at the edge, means there are new opportunities for the controller to monitor and enforce security policies across the entire system.
Despite this potential, the panellists on the SDN discussions agreed market adoption has been slow so far. It could take up to three to five years for SDN to be the common networking framework, Cohen says.
As it gets implemented, though, the technology will continue to improve. One area he expects to see future development in is around high-level networking functionality being controlled by SDN controllers. Layer 4-7 functions, for example, have not been as integrated as the virtual networking L2 and L3 functions, at least in OpenStack, he says.
Despite the apparent popularity of the OpenStack framework, there have been cricisms too. Mark Templeton, CEO of Citrix, said at the Synergy event in Barccelona that it was Citrix’s intent to support both OpenStack and CloudStack, but that OpenStack had not seen the progress necessary for current use.
"CloudStack is more mature and OpenStack is not maturing fast enough," said Templeton. "We had to decide where to put resources and we decided to put it behind CloudStack and the Apache Software Foundation."
IDG News Service and TechCentral Reporters
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