The Software is the Network

Virtualization probably is the single biggest disruptive technology in the ICT world with ramifications across every sphere of IT infrastructure and management. Today virtualization is the backbone technology for many of the disruptive developments like Cloud to work seamlessly. Virtualization takes into its ambit almost any IT related thing-hardware, software, memory, compute et al. Just like Virtualization impacted the IT world, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is impacting the network world. At the elementary level, what SDN ushers in is decoupling the networking hardware-that's boxed up and driven by rigid architectures-to software defined, open and easily managed. And in the bargain, the network and its management are governed by software and that changes the whole network paradigm.

SDN DEMYSTIFIED

Let's speak to some experts and figure out what really is SDN and how can it change the personality of the networks. Quips Mahesh Gupta, Geo, Lead, Enterprise Networks Sales, Cisco India and Saarc, "SDN is an emerging concept that looks at de-coupling the control and data planes in network devices and abstracting the control plane intelligence. While the buzz around this topic began initially with the Open Network Foundation and OpenFlow, the term has broadened its applicability over the last 12 months."

We also caught up with Sajan Paul, Director, Systems Engineering, India and Saarc, Juniper Networks to understand why SDN is a game changing technology. Says Sajan Paul: "Traditional networks are inflexible and static, and not designed for programmatic control. Network functions were hard-wired into chips, control and data planes were tightly coupled, architecture was monolithic, configuration was device-specific and generally manual, and there were no well-defined APIs for sharing data path state with applications. This means that running these networks is challenging-both complex and costly-and deploying new applications and services takes way too much time."

"The need for software defined networking (SDN) is clear," says Paul.

Experts like him also feel that traditional networks have not kept pace with the improvements we have seen in virtualizing computing and storage, so the major shift brought about by SDN is that the network has become an equal participant in the orchestration stack to allow new value to be derived from IT investments. Today more than ever, the network plays a pivotal role in driving business benefits for enterprise and service provider customers.

"Software Defined Networking represents the biggest change to the network in many years. What makes SDN interesting is the transformation that it can enable. Businesses are looking for more control over their applications on the network. SDN promises to deliver agility and simplification in the network to support applications. With SDN, the network becomes more efficient and agile, and an enabler for delivering on business goals for application performance," adds Paul.

TRANSFORMATIONAL TECHNOLOGY

But why is that SDN is most talked in the last one year? This is because of the increasing complexities which technologies like cloud had placed on networks and hence every service provider or the data center out there wants to optimize on their network and looking at ways and means in achieving that goal of 5 nines or more uptime in real life scenarios. As IT organizations move to a converged infrastructure and service-oriented model, many are finding that current data center networking architectures are a limiting factor.

Reflecting on this BS Nagarajan, Director, Systems Engineering, India and Saarc, VMware says, "Cloud computing has put a real strain on traditional approaches to networking. Managing networks and networking services in a cloud environment is complex and time-consuming: to provision and configure the networking services for workloads in the cloud, customers often have to deal with creating and managing thousands of VLANs and its rules. As a result, while provisioning a VM may take only 2 min, provisioning the associated network and networking services can add days or even weeks to the process. Furthermore, cloud computing benefits from applications' ability to move all around a datacenter (or even across datacenters). However, physical network topology limits workload mobility within the scope of a top-of-the-rack switch and a handful of servers. The industry clearly recognizes the need and opportunity to transform networking for the cloud and thus to enable even more agility and efficiency in its operation."

Experts say that to address these challenges, software-defined networking starts by virtualizing the network, decoupling the logical view of a network from its physical implementation. It does so by creating an abstraction layer between server hosts and existing networking gear which decouples and isolates virtual networks for specific networking hardware, turning it into a pool of network capacity. This enables the on-demand, programmatic creation of tens of thousands of isolated virtual networks with the simplicity and operational ease of creating and managing virtual machines. The resulting business value comes from more agile, efficient, flexible, and robust networking configurations.

Meanwhile Santhosh D' Souza, Director, Systems Engineering, NetApp Marketing & Services says, "Increasingly the vision of a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) appears to be the next stop on this journey. In an SDDC, application environments are decoupled from computer hardware, data containers abstracted from storage hardware and network services separated from network interfaces. This promises to transform the management and operations of datacenter components-compute, storage, and networking pools are assembled out of different brands of products and applications; data and network traffic are sent dynamically through sections of these pools based on a set of management policies and the quality of service demanded by the workload."

Other agrees as well. Quips Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP Networking, India: "We offer a combination of technologies in the SDN space. Our SDN approach is defined by an open ecosystem and has two important elements-the SDN controller and SDN App Store. These are industry's first innovations and offers best of breed technologies on SDN. This approach makes HP a leading player in SDN that factors in a whole lot of constituents like-infrastructure, content software, apps together with an integration framework."

VENDOR PLAY

During VMworld 2013, VMware announced that it would offer SDN on NSX-its platform for network virtualization which will deliver the entire networking and security model decoupled from underlying networking hardware. The company acquired Nicira-that expanded its portfolio of networking assets. The company says that its competencies, together with Nicira, gives customers the industry leading SDN solutions for any cloud environment, on any hypervisor in the enterprise and with service providers.

Meanwhile according to sources at Juniper Networks, Juniper is the only networking provider with a SDN strategy that addresses the key challenges customers face with networks today and provides a clear set of steps that can enable customers to start taking advantage of the promise of a SDN-enabled network in 2013 and beyond.

Juniper Networks recently announced the availability of Contrail, a standards-based and highly scalable network virtualization and intelligence solution for SDN. Contrail is a production-ready SDN solution that is based on stable and proven networking standards. Contrail creates a virtual network, enabling seamless integration between physical and virtual networks while providing service providers and enterprises with a solution that is simple, open, and agile. This network virtualization and intelligence solution has been in trials with more than 40 global customers.

Cisco is also making significant investments in this space and is currently working with customers across various segments in educating and getting feedback from them. It is also conducting early field trials with customers to explore these new concepts. The company feels that the Indian market has several thought leaders and a high capacity to absorb innovation and it is eagerly looking forward to working with its customers here. The company also say that its approach has been applauded by various analysts and it has seen a strong interest in customers, many of whom are eagerly signing up for early field trials and say that Cisco's Open Network Environment or Cisco ONE-its approach to network programmability-is panning out well.

Meanwhile NetApp's Clustered Data ONTAP is the first storage and data management solution that makes the promise of Software Defined Storage attainable. In an SDDC, Clustered Data ONTAP focuses on agility in delivering IT services to application owners while improving operational and IT resource efficiency. NetApp's Storage Virtual Machine (SVM) allows enterprises to deploy native multi-tenant, policy-based storage services via programmable APIs and application integrations.

HP, on the other hand, is positioning its developer kit to provide developers with the essential tools to create test and validate SDN applications. The HP SDN App Store lets customers browse, search, purchase, and directly download SDN applications onto their Virtual Application Networks SDN controller, creating a new business model for how network services are purchased and implemented.

Big Blue IBM is also upping its ante in SDN and its initiative like SDN for Virtual Environments (SDN VE) is nothing but a virtual overlay network solution that automates and speeds the process of setting up such SDN networks. In addition, SDN VE enables network administrators to speed up traditionally time-consuming tasks such as network provisioning from days to hours. IBM terms its vision on SDN as one of an intelligent data-driven ecosystem that is easily managed and scaled to meet changing market demands. Recently IBM also launched an OpenFlow based SDN solution by releasing a SDN controller as well.

The ROAD AHEAD

Two decades ago, Oracle founder Larry Ellison envisioned network computer (NC). While Oracle did not pursue that aggressively at that time, but now the cloud and the other developments (the latest one being Google Chrome Book) only prove that Ellison's foresight has fructified and network has indeed become the heart of computing today.

In that line SDN can be called ‘virtualizing the network' and gives more muscle to the traditional routers and switches and unplugs the network from its self-set limits. Going by market projections, an IDC report suggests that by 2016, the SDN market will reach $2 bn. So clearly SDN is on the threshold of becoming one of the hottest technologies to look out for in the coming days and it has the potential to alter the very fabric of network topologies.