The Soft Side of Networking

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has definitely moved past theory and is entering into a more action-oriented phase By Jasmine Desai

The idea of network administrators having programmable central control of network traffic without requiring physical access to the network’s hardware devices seems to be finally gaining ground. A sign of this is Juniper’s recently announced strategy on SDN, which focuses on six principles that address the networking challenges being faced by the industry today. These include:
Separating networking software into four layers (or planes) – management, services, control and forwarding;
Centralizing aspects of the management, services and control software to simplify network design and lower operating costs;
Using the cloud for elastic scale and flexible deployment;
Creating a platform for network applications, services and integration into management systems, enabling new business solutions;
Standardizing protocols for interoperable, heterogeneous support across vendors, providing choice and lowering cost; and
Broadly applying SDN principles to all networking and network services, including security.

Cisco also recently announced its strategy known as Open Network Environment strategy or popularly known as Cisco ONE. It will be executed through a set of APIs, agents and controllers, and overlay networks. New offerings included onePK (One platform kit)—a developer kit across Cisco’s entire network infrastructure, spanning across IOS, NX-OS and IOR-XR.

The long saga of SDN

Sajan Paul, Director of Systems Engineering for India and SAARC, Juniper Networks, says, “Today’s network is not really aware of what is happening between devices and cloud. There has to be an element that comes in wherein the network can also be aware of these two entities, the device that consumes the information and cloud that is giving the information.” Networks today are largely monolithic. They are not application aware. They are geographically diverse and distributed. That is why, SDN as a principle needs to be looked at more holistically.

Every time that servers are virtualized, the other portion of the data center, which includes network, storage, security and management, has a ripple effect on it. One needs to intelligently automate and provision these resources without IT intervention every time. Also, all these resources ultimately are used for an application. In a huge organization, each time an employee asks for infrastructure for an application, providing it can be a mammoth task. And it is possible only if there is a layer of abstraction and automation built into all layers of infrastructure. Although servers were behaving as pool of resource, the IT guys still have to do tweaking around network and storage. It has to be a policy-based automation now, such that the infrstructure automatically configures and adapts to the user needs based on previous configuration. Everything needs to be managed from the same console. 
As per Sanchit Vir Gogia, Founder & CEO,Greyhound Research “Virtualization is the starting point of SDN. One needs to have it all across compute or server, networking, storage and the management layer. Every vendor has its own USP. Services partners will be at center stage here, as individual vendor will not be able to drive their own agenda on the same account.”

Mentions Mahesh Gupta, Vice President – Borderless Networks, Cisco India ad SAARC, “SDN is an excellent opportunity to further let applications harness the intelligence we build into our networks, especially at the network edge and top-of-rack. It will support multiple deployment models that provide tightly integrated control and data planes, loosely coupled models and hybrid models with distributed intelligence.”

As per a Forrester report, Networking Predictions for 2013 by Andre Kindness, SDN’s value only comes to fruition as part of infrastructure evolution to automation. Organization will need a large upfront investment in standardizing processes and infrastructure as well as changes to organizational structures, skills, and sourcing that will be uncomfortable for I&O teams and colleagues alike. Forrester recommends putting SDN on the back burner and focusing on getting the networking team up to speed on virtualization to achieve consistency in roles and responsibilities across the virtual and physical worlds. Once networking team members master virtualization, they will be in a much better position to take on SDN.

No more a myth

When it comes to SDN, network will be like a platform and the platform will be dependent on the applications being built on it. The value of network through SDN will come when network applications are built on it. Application vendors come into foray here and they will do so when SDN exposes network as a platform. They will have much agile, programmable and faster networks.
Says Gogia of Greyhound Research, “Organizations are still struggling with it. These are still very initial days for it. Although vendors are having great strategy, but this will not flash till couple of next quarters.” Strategy of vendors in SDN is also involving educating the workforce and partners to come up to speed with these emerging concepts. From customer perspective, they should ask vendors how well are they aligned to their sale strategy. They should buy hardware that is SDN capable. Need to understand that what application will help you program the network

The Forrester report “Workload-Centric Infrastructure Ignites Software-Defined Networking” by Andre Kindness pretty much sums up the attitude toward SDN: I&O wants the power to leverage the network as needed. Consequently, networking teams should focus on how to deliver a scalable, secure, simple, shared, and standardized platform and not worry about where the programming is going to take place.

jasmine.desai@expressindia.com