Bharti Airtel is the third largest operator having a customer base of 350 million across 19 countries. As the company grew, the amount of voice calls and data that they had to store (as per government rules) also increased exponentially. The physical network was nearing its saturation limits.
Due to its huge growth, the firm was facing challenges in optimizing its physical networks. The physical ports were getting choked up as they were being over utilized. While changing the port was an option, there was a corresponding action – the moment a switch was replaced, the corresponding infrastructure also needed to be changed.
States Manish Singh, Head Global Network Infra & Foundation Services at Bharti Airtel, “Imagine having 350 million subscribers, and then wanting to change the whole layer. To resolve our issue, we decided to look deep into the network.” Singh found huge east-west traffic in the network where there was lot of unnecessary communication going on between servers. The other pain point that the firm faced was an absence of a single orchestration layer across all network components (switches, firewalls, routers etc.)
Another major hurdle was in terms of implementation. This happened as the administrator had to log into every device individually, and any request raised took many days to fulfill. The organization wanted to reduce the timeline from 100 days to one day and was looking for an appropriate solution.
Normally, Singh’s team used to get requests from businesses and accordingly, the team used to provide IT infrastructure. In specific scenarios, the team went across to businesses and asked them about their requirements in terms of server, storage, hard disk, RAM and networking. Accordingly, a service request was created which used to go the vendor and the procurement, delivery and deployment took specific amount of time. “Somehow, we were not able to fulfill the agility demanded by the telecom industry. The telecom industry demands customized innovation, timing and agility and we did not want to miss any of it,” recalls Singh.
Waving the magic wand of network virtualization
Bharti already has a cloud infrastructure in place. For example, in case someone somewhere wants compute, they can simply log into the portal and give the specification in terms of how many VMs, cores, RAM or storage is required, and it goes for approval. Once approved, the services get provisioned within next 15 minutes. The cycle has come down from 100 days to around 15 minutes now.
All these things can be resolved with a virtualized network. With a virtualized network, all network components can be managed via a single layer. If one wants to upgrade any of the network components, or scale up or scale down, increasing throughput can be easily done with a virtualized network.
To achieve network virtualization, Bharti Airtel decided to opt for Vmware NSX. Today, the east-west traffic which was the biggest pain is now contained to that virtual environment and doesn’t go upward and touches the core layer or diverges. There are more than 180 to 190 firewalls in the datacenter. With network virtualization, these firewalls can be reduced almost by 75%.
When it comes to VMware NSX and DR, there is flexibility of designing it in two ways i.e. alternative mode or hybrid mode. When designed in hybrid mode network, it has the flexibility to extend the switch and router up to the DR. It is a logical layer which gets built. Same server, VM, IP which was available in the production environment, can be found in the DR site itself. Earlier it would take 3-4 hours to enable a DR. However, now it happens with a click of a button wherein one can invoke a particular application into the DR.
Says Singh, “While working with NSX, you have be very open-minded. Being a network guy, I tend to carry the legacy of networks in my mind, which can hold me back in adopting a new technology or a new innovation. My advice would be to leave the target aside and think NSX with a fresh mind.”
Organizations are still skeptical when it comes to embracing software defined networking whole-heartedly. “Organizations have to adopt a software defined network or compute as there is no other option, if one wants to stay in the game. It is better to do it now than later,” asserts Singh.
