Sunil Khandekar, CEO of Nuage Networks, and Ray Mota, CEO, ACG Research, discuss what SDN can do for network automation, economic benefits of virtualization, and what carriers must do to reap those benefits SD-WAN vendors are looking at automating VPN branch connectivity over private networks and the Internet. They are quickly realizing that it is not another software e-packet that works through a machine nor is it another one-off device that has evolved and called SDN nor another branch router. Their current approach is to solely automate the WAN hardware using a purpose built box. This results in a silo-ed automation layer. Carriers are telling us these islands of automation are proving to be a mistake and the economics are not working out. In fact, in some cases, the opex spend is ending up to be more expensive than in previous models.
What is needed for sustained business value is a really good policy-based architecture that allows for user to user connectivity and user to application connectivity. It is about connecting hyper-distributed users to applications in the private or the public data center; that’s where the true value of network virtualization comes in.
What is needed is solid architecture that has a centralized policy engine and SDN controller, which has proven technology based on carrier grade management protocols and platforms. It has to provide and connect workloads physical and virtual environments, and across different hypervisors or Docker containers, to any locations in the WAN, data center or public cloud.
Using this approach results in uses cases leads to:
- Visibility in the network.
- Quickly, securely and consistently create overlays, scale them, and logically isolate workloads and tenants, which enables micro segmentation, including service insertion of firewalls and other application services.
- Rapid remediation based on a trend that is detected and preventing malware spread.
Check out the video session, which focuses on sustainable business solutions for SD-WAN and why a siloed automation layer is no longer viable. Sunil goes to the whiteboard and shares how moving up the chain to a centralized, policy-based architecture taps into the true value of cloud automation.
Key Points:
- Service providers are taking purpose built boxes and making a virtualized version, assuming erroneously that they are now virtualized; there is very little gain with this silo box.
- SDN is compelling; however, it is imperative to know what SDN can and can’t do in terms of network automation; what we see is the islands of automation being created.
- Current SDN solutions are emerging as mono-hypervisor so they create one overlay, two (NFV overlay), only addressing the mono-hypervisor, rarely going across different verticals.
- Architecture must have a centralized policy engine and SDN controller, which has proven technology based on router protocols for scalability and management. It also has to provide and connect workloads in a multitude of environments, existing KVM, Hyper-V, to any locations as well into public cloud.
- Moving up the chain to a centralized, policy-based architecture taps into the true value of cloud automation.
- Nuage Networks has 60+ customers that are deployed in production, outsourced service providers, telcos and large enterprises.
