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Preparing businesses for software-defined IT

A look at why new-IP network infrastructures, software models and open approaches matter for networks

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Pratima Harigunani
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By Swapna Bapat

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IN this new era, the data centre is becoming the ‘front door’ of the organisation, where it can directly impact how fast companies can respond to the competition and customer requirements. This is an era where customers interact with businesses through technology much more than face-to-face engagements, as evident by the myriad of devices and apps in use. This means networking in the data centre must become more agile, dynamic and automated.

This transformation of the network, called the New IP, is characterised by virtualised and software-based network services running on commoditised hardware. It is also driven by customer demand for open architectures and open-source technologies to avoid vendor lock-in.

Some are already on their way into the transformation, but to truly know if they are headed in the right direction, a five-point checklist can be used for assessment:

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Standards: Proprietary or Open?

The New IP is fueled by open-sourced initiatives such as OpenDaylight and OpenStack, designed to support Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and cloud adoption.

Legacy networks continue to be more expensive and cumbersome with age, but the cost-savings potential of open standards in networking is widely known. Thankfully, the shift to open standards is already underway with leading organisations, such as OpenDayLight, OpenFlow and OpenStack, putting pressure on the industry to take openness seriously.

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As part of New IP, SDN has the potential to turn the promise of new and evolving technologies like cloud, Big Data, the Internet of Things and seamless mobility into a reality. While CIOs and IT Directors alike are still taking stock of SDN, it is undeniable that businesses that want to compete in the future need to be evaluating their existing infrastructures and thinking carefully about how SDN will fit in with their long-term networking strategies.

The Future of Networking Hardware is in Software

The network is in many ways the last frontier for IT infrastructure innovation. Designed to work with virtualised environments, technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) enable organisations to more efficiently utilise the benefits of cloud and mobile technologies.

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SDN helps make networks manageable for IT administrators through automation and programmability, and can be automatically reconfigured to address increasing traffic flows and other network changes. Accelerated Ethernet fabric-based hardware that delivers high utilisation, performance and resiliency will continue to play a dominant role for years to come in the IP network.

IT Spending: On upfront costs and maintenance, or innovation?

The IT budgets of most organisations are often knotted up in supporting legacy infrastructure, with not much left for innovation. However, the New IP revolutionises IT spending, and replaces high CapEx and OpEx spend with utility-based costs determined by the user, not the vendor.

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“As-a-service” models exclude the need to invest in hardware upfront and allow organisations to align IT infrastructure capacity and network demand. The scalability and elasticity lets them increase or decrease the network capacity they pay for as needs change. This lets them better manage and balance CapEx and OpEx spend.

Hence, the New IP-based network infrastructure brings a long-term lifespan compared to the planned obsolescence of a legacy network, which can help direct IT spending to innovation instead of maintenance. With the shift to New IP, the network infrastructure of an organisation is more efficient. New IP lets them reduce costs while increasing network capabilities.

Shifting Control to the Organisation

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History has illustrated that when a vendor gains control, the customer loses control of their CapEx, Opex and innovation. The vendor becomes the only source for products, solutions, architecture and technology, and the vendor is free to dictate all these to the customer.

Vendors gain control through vendor lock-in and proprietary technologies. That was the age of mainframes, when computing was monolithic. It is not just hardware supplied by a single vendor, but also the operating system, applications, storage, memory and even cabling.

The cost of computing fell and speed of innovation rose dramatically during the client-server period as computing became “disaggregated” and companies were free to buy PCs or servers, software and applications from any vendor.

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Yet today, networking is still very much vendor lock-in. It is traditional as innovation has not progressed much beyond some new protocols and bigger, higher-density boxes over the last two decades. There may be hundreds of Requests for Comments (RFCs) and IEEE standards to ensure interoperability, but huge complexities drives organisations to source from a single vendor.

Companies and businesses should regain control from vendors with the New IP platform bringing potential with technologies like SDN and NFV. Networking software components should be able to run on any hardware, and support open-sourced, open APIs and open standards.

Is There a Place for Networking Hardware?

While software-defined technologies are central in the New IP, incorporating a dynamic physical network infrastructure remains a critical building block of network modernisation. In fact, the physical underlay plays a critical role, as the best of network virtualisation will fail if the physical network breaks.

Many organisations are encountering challenges in scaling existing network bandwidth and supporting increasing numbers of users and devices that require highly dynamic networks. Investing in solutions that deliver flexibility and features of software, and seamlessly integrate into current hardware platforms will ensure a smooth transition between legacy infrastructure and networks designed for the New IP.

Gartner recently developed a report positioning Ethernet fabrics as the solution to the challenges of data centre physical networks. Ethernet Fabrics form the foundation for a virtualized data center but not all fabrics are created equal, so it pays to evaluate if they have the features needed to work and integrate with network virtualisation technologies.

(Swapna Bapat is Director of Systems Engineering, Brocade India. CyberMedia does not necessarily endorse the views of the author here)

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