In An IT manager can expect simplification, playfulness, orchestration and convergence from SDN. This change will allow him to accelerate in cloud, converged infrastructure and workload awareness around his IT systems. IT managers will be able to gear their networking investments more in tune with the business, rather than just seen as speed-and-feed universal connectivity components as networks are deemed by business today.
What is going to Change for IT Managers?
Amandeep Singh Dang, Country Manager, Networking,DellIndia, reiterates that SDN enables a new type of network virtualisation, providing the last piece of the puzzle required to deliver low-lost, all-inclusive private cloud solutions to the enterprise data centre. SDN is the key to enabling significant technologies from the all-inclusive elastic private-cloud to secure mobile access, BYOD and beyond, all with a highly automated model that can give enterprise IT never-before-seen levels of agility while reducing both capital and operational overhead to the lowest levels ever delivered in enterprise solutions, he says.
Dang candidly says that IT managers can
- Leverage cloud technology to the fullest. Enable a new type of network virtualisation
- Do Network simplification with more real-time intelligence, deep application integration and high levels of automation to prepare networking technology for the rigorous business demands.
- Allow competitive multi-vendor play bringing down overall cost of ownership.
- Do Network consolidation and IT unification (server + Storage + Networking + Apps awareness).
- Networking as a service to the internal enterprise.
Dang says that as the cloud era takes shape, technology continues to play an increasing role in all aspects of business; this role is shifting from operational support to becoming core to product and service delivery and customer interaction. The data centre is becoming the manufacturing floor of the information era. Business investment in technology is growing; the question now is, who will get the budget and control over technology investments in the new growth areas in business innovation. This is where SDN can be of tremendous benefit. Not only in mere operational streamlining, but rather through providing robust tools that empower administrators to drive operational innovation, adds Dang.
SDN does not turn the network into a template to pass on to server administrators; rather, it provides a deep and dynamic application and network integration driving an end to silos through greater collaboration, enabling network architects to take a more proactive role in delivering cloud services, applications and driving the next-generation user experience. And that is the real value of SDN. It is not a specific killer feature or use case, but rather, it is a platform with the clear potential of solving many of the most critical challenges in the traditional networking model, and it is a platform that creates entirely new possibilities for the future of networking, says Dang.
Vijay Sethi, VP-IT & CIO, HeroMoto Corp, finds various benefits: ease of management of networks because of automation, elimination of the need to configure individual devices as central configuration would be possible, increased network reliability and security because of centralised and automated management of network devices, uniform policy enforcement and fewer configuration errors and better experience to end-users and be more cost effective. He says that not many IT leaders and network managers are considering SDN in corporate India, as of today, as awareness about the SDN concept and capabilities is very low. I feel we are experiencing the cycle we underwent during virtualisation and cloud--where there were some early adopters; --but it took a few years to have those concepts universally understood. SDN will follow a similar route, and in time to come, SDN would be a much more frequently used term in corporate IT departments. Standards about SDN and the application and partner eco system will also evolve as there are more adopters. Also, for going in for SDN, IT departments would need to go through a lot of change management as the role and skill sets of network managers would undergo a lot of change, says Sethi.
According to LuiSimonetti and Gates Zeng Networking Systems Engineering Specialists, Avaya, Senior IT managers should expect SDN solutions to require a certain amount of customisation (which can be very involved). So they need to ensure enough of the right type of specialised technical resources are available to handle it. These resources may be hard to come by.
The IT organisation typically relies on the standard control plane protocols such as Open Shortest Path First (OSFP) and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for topology discovery and to establish routing/ forwarding databases, remarks Luisimonetti, Networking Systems Engineering Specialist, Avaya. Now the IT organisation has more freedom and control, but necessary resources are required to understand and handle different situations. For example, early adopters of SDN (Google for instance) have a sizeable development team working on SDN, programming and writing code. In a nutshell, if you want the network to be programmable, you need to program it.
One of the goals of SDN is to virtualise networks in a similar way to virtualised platforms (Computing, Storage etc). Today, in the data centre environment, it takes minutes to create a virtual machine including the CPU, memory, storage and so on. However, the network virtualisation is not at the same level. Once you cross the platform boundary, the network readiness takes longer. Technologies such as SPB can improve the configuration because SPB is service based.
Gates Zeng Networking Systems Engineering Specialists, Avaya, believes that today there is little interaction between the platform and network side, and that both sides are controlled by different management system. Through SDN, however, the chance of integrating platform and network management becomes a reality. For example, through OpenStack, the open cloud computing platform, data centre administrators will be able to use a single graphical user interface to do everything from deploying virtual machines to assigning storage to configuring networks, says Zeng.
Avayas Software Define Data Center (SDDC) framework includes the companysOpenStack Horizon-based Management Platform, with orchestration capabilities for compute, storage and networking through Avayas Fabric Connect. SDN, combined with the ongoing virtualisation of the server and storage components, is creating visions of software-defined data centres that are highly automated, dynamic, scalable and flexible
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