‘We believe in evolution of technology’

HONG KONG, CHINA: Pearson, recently in an interview with Pankaj Maru of CIOL, on the sidelines of the APAC Press & Analyst Summit held at Hong Kong, discussed about HP's SDN technology, its importance for organizations and data centre environments in the future and much more. Excerpts.

CIOL: How do you see the evolution of SDN (Software Defined Networking) technology given the trend of organizations adopting or moving towards green data centres?

Mark Pearson: We think SDN technology is very important for data centres as it allows for scale and open API access to networks. And we are interested in SDN in the form of network virtualization and again here have introduced the technology called Virtual Applications Networks (VPN) at NetEvents.

VPN create applications awareness the through use of networks control plane that can be made available to system administrators for creating virtual networks in the data centres. And we create a layer in our architecture called Intelligent Management Center (IMC) to orchestrate the configuration of networking elements for the VPN. 

CIOL: According to you, how long it will take for SDN technology to be highly accepted and adopted in the IT industry?

MP: We believe in an evolution of technology that is not necessarily an immediate revolution and therefore people will gradually accept the technology including the use of current technology and then move to OpenFlow interfaces. That is why we offer a hybrid implementation of OpenFlow that co-exits with existing direct control functions.

So the acceptance will be evolutionary and we will make use it in the context of Virtual Application Networks, which uses a variety of technologies for enabling virtualization.

CIOL: What is the core business value or proposition that will drive SDN technology in coming years?

MP: Business value is that we believe in deploying cloud applications. This means very fast speed of deploying applications. The problem with current networks is that they are very slow to configure to a new application. However, using this technology (SDN) we can take the deployments from weeks down to minutes. So we think this is very important.

CIOL: Will this new technology, SDN, bring in any kind of the additional cost burden for the enterprises and organizations? Also, will it be only available to HP customers?

MP: I think it is into the existing environment. In fact we are releasing components in our existing products mainly the Intelligent Management Centre to implement the first phase of the control plate as the Intelligent Management Centre is used in today’s network and it is an evolutionary technology.

The first phase is only with HP devices as per the policy of HP Virtual Application Networks, however the Intelligent Management Centre product is in itself an open system that manages over 6,000 open vendor devices.

CIOL: Where do you see the high usage or adoption of SDN technology coming from?

MP: It applies in many markets. We definitely see interest in the cloud data centres — which could be private, public or hybrid, along with cloud implementations. And, we also see interest coming from wide area networks (WAN) and others.