Sajan Paul, Director, Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, discusses with Abhishek Raval about the interest shown by Indian CIOs for Software Defined Networking (SDN) and thereby the RFPs received.
According to Gartner’s recent India IT infrastructure survey, “with increased focus on mobility and big data activities in India, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is getting discussed and adopted amongst Indian enterprises,” What sense are you getting from the potential customers?
Since the last one year, CIOs, Network managers have given a serious look to SDN. It is a part of the RFPs floated by them. At times the IT decision makers get carried away by the benefits of SDN and take it as a solution to every network related issue. That should not be the case. SDN has it’s strengths and weaknesses.
The first level of interest that we are seeing is largely in DCs, where there are many add, move and changes. DCs with dynamic requirements. SDN might not be the right networking approach for server environmrents, which typically don’t change much.
The real interest is coming from large DC consolidation projects, which may include 50 rack plus kind of a heavily virtualised deployment. Most of the DCs are virtualised and thus SDN has a role to play.
Another area from where we see interest is coming from for SDN – from environments, where- on and off- there is an exponential demand for IT resources. There are huge sprawls which are sourced to meet and catch up to the transaction demand spike in the festive season. The companies have to scale out horizontally not so much for dispensing services to end customer but catering to their own workload. SDN helps them to be more agile and quicker in time to market.
The public cloud infrastructure providers are the third kind of potential customers showing interest in SDN. These are datacentre hosting & co-location providers, whose vision is to become more cloud centric operators. They want to become the Amazons of the world using SaaS, IaaS, PaaS etc. These operators want to expand their product portfolio under the available infrastructure.
Virtualised environments provide the best use cases for SDN. Telcos have a highly virtualised environment and SDN can prove to be a facilitator for telcos to generate new revenue streams. Discuss some use cases of SDN for the telecommunication sector.
We have received RFPs from almost all telcos for Network Function Virtualisation (NFV). The telcos want to move on from just being bandwidth providers to becoming active service providers. They want to to be multi-service providers- offering firewall as a service, load balancer as a service, hosting as a service, IP telephony as a service.
Any service that can be virtualised qualifies for being provided on a cloud model using NFV. It’s a move to an Opex model. Apart from Bandwidth, telcos can provide firewall or load balancer (or any of the above )as a service for a per month fee.
The telcos can buy physical devices but it has a limited lifecycle and the connectivity- add, move and changes becomes extremely difficult. So, SDN with NFV proves to be the right fit. This will allow the service provider to monetise the network much faster opening up more revenue streams. On top of that- better SLAs to the customer and better visibility into the network. This allows the telcos to unshackle themselves from the dependency on physical devices. They can be virtualised. It makes them agile. In the virtual world, the possession doesn’t matter. You can launch a server on whichever floor of the building.
SDN with NFV didn’t take off in the past because the SDN wasn’t mature. For vendors like us, offering firewall, Load balancer-as-a-service wasn’t possible.
You also talked about a soon to be launched public cloud provider doing an RFP for your platform.
Yes, one of the companies with whom we are doing an RFP is a public cloud operator. The company will launch operations in an year. They are doing trials in a semi-production environment. We have an OpenContrail platform, having a completely OpenStack distribution with a SDN controller built in. Essentially it will allow the public cloud provider to launch their entire cloud without the need of any other software except the application software.
As a result, they can launch IaaS, SaaS and many other services. If the e-tailers hosted on say for e.g. Amazon, who feel hosting in India would make them more attractive because of the governance within the Indian boundaries, it can easily be done using the SDN orchestration.
Elaborate on Juniper’s Contrail platform
Contrail platform is largely focussed on the OpenStack community. It’s an open source platform. We have two products to offer- OpenStack cloud: the Contrail cloud, which is a full distribution of the OpenStack i.e Juniper’s Contrail allows to start cloud operations in a matter of hours but with the required application developers. So, it’s a fully deployable cloud stack.
The second product is Contrail Networking- it has all the network plug-ins. Juniper’s OpenStack plug-in called Neutron works in any given OpenStack environment. It helps in the required network orchestration and allows, for e.g. in an environment having a server sprawl of 1000 servers- Each server can be discovered within the controller to craft the desired network virtualisation. All this is possible right from the server level. Not even from the Switch.
The key advantage is that this can be done on any vendor’s Open switching and routing platform. The Contrail platform will make sure that every server is treated like a network endpoint. Since there is visibility of every server’s hypervisor, any virtual domain can be easily crafted accordingly. Thus it is easy to manage IP addresses, Firewalls, security, DNS policies etc. Being on an OpenSource platform, the source code is downloadable and Juniper provides all the support.
