Networking is cool (and hot) again
Back in May I had the opportunity to post a long blog post titled The Soft Network giving a perspective on the extraordinary industry interest for Network Virtualization and Software-Defined Networks.
Last month two other women technologists I respect a great deal wrote interesting comments on the same topic (Cisco’s Padmasree Warrior and Arista’s Jayshree Ullal), both confirming emphatically that networking is cool again! Granted, the views of these two executives are appropriately crafted around the vision they drive for their respective corporations but they offer a good glance of the huge interests at stake for their companies and the customers they serve. Here are views from other data center heavy weights vendors (HP, Dell, NEC) responding to key and challenging questions from Gartner on whether SDN is the future of networking.
The astonishing $1.26B acquisition of Nicira by VMware sent a shock wave in the industry and redefined the terms of engagement for all, hence the reaction of my two esteemed female colleagues.
I can understand why people are emphatic, surprised, disappointed, and suddenly effusive or successively going through these reactions. As says Martin Casada (Nicira, VMware) “Networking has long been a complex environment, and therefore is rather easy to mischaracterize what is going on.” As confusion between Network Virtualization and Software-Defined Network starts to increase, a simple explanation is in order.
Network Virtualization
Network Virtualization aims at proposing a new way of sharing a network where the unit of sharing is no longer the packet but an entire network slice.
This means that thanks to a virtual network hypervisor, each user (or group of users) can be provisioned by a separated logical network that he/she can control independently. Creating a virtual network greatly simplify the complexity associated with its management.
A way to virtualize network is what Nicira is doing with NVP, its virtual overlay network hypervisor: virtualizing the network at the edge (ie at vswitch level) by hiding the physical fabric. Reducing complexity increases scalability, which is absolutely mandatory in Data Centers.
But network virtualization does not stop there. It can be expanded to the concept of virtual topology, interconnecting virtual network elements working in concert to transport data around fast and smoothly according to application needs. With this approach, the power of Network Virtualization would fully explode.
In that, the benefits of Network Virtualization are different from the benefits of server virtualization: think incredible flexibility versus consolidation. And with flexibility comes the key benefits of a differentiation of usage (and SLAs) and a reduction of operations complexity two elements critical when dealing with more and more demanding business requirements faced by a (costly) infrastructure.
The software-definition of network
In the first five minutes of this video Stanford’s Nick McKeown gives us a high level view of why SDN is a natural evolution of networks.
I see SDN as the how-to-build-virtual-networks rooted in the decoupling of data plane and control plane. Openflow exemplifies how this decoupling can be done.
In other words it is an independent software that programs the behavior of the virtual topology.
SDN is coming today because of two converging forces: network hardware commoditization and need for more flexibility in the network. SDN is a great opportunity for the Network to be more private, virtually private, isolated and customized, for privacy, for differentiation, for agility. With all these bricks, we now have a fertile environment for making the network virtual and thus programmable and agile!
Show me
To illustrate what it means for users make sure to read Google’s deployment using SDN and OpenFlow on its largest production network; a game-changing use case that reveals why Networking is Cool Again … in a whole new incarnation!
Learn more about SDN and OpenFlow and meet us at the AdvancedTCA Summit’s OpenFlow seminar in Santa Clara on September 18th.