Webinar: Secure and Scale the Gi-LAN at 80% Lower TCO

Mobile network traffic is expected to increase 45% annually with video representing 60% of all mobile traffic. To meet the demand, networks will need to be intelligently and cost effectively scaled for secure services delivery, especially the Gi-LAN. As volumes grow, the number of concurrent users, connection rates, and throughput will all need to scale together. But how can operators evolve their architectures to support this growth while lowering TCO?

Join F5‘s Misbah Mahmoodi, and ACG’s Paul Parker-Johnson and register for this webinar to learn about:

• The market and business challenges IoT devices, applications and the growing number of users are placing on mobile networks.
• The key criteria to use when architecting for massive scale in application delivery infrastructures.
• Three TCO sizing models you can reference to dimension our network performance needs.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

www.acgcc.com

Roll It! ACG’s 2015 Omega Winners Are…

ACG Research is honored to announce the 2015 Omega Awards. The award recognizes excellence in message marketing for either a HotSeat, Whiteboard or Spotlight Innovation video as well as vendor operational excellence. The 2015 winners are Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, and iXia. Winners were cited and honored because “of their achievements in the areas of product innovation, message marketing or operational excellence,” said Ray Mota.

Big Switch Networks was the winner of the Breakthrough Innovation Product for its Big Cloud Fabric 3.0., which provides hyper-scale networking in public, hybrid and private clouds. BCF is unique in that it delivers on the core vision of SDN on more dimensions than any other solution currently available. Big Switch Networks is the first supplier to have achieved that goal. BCF uses open software running on low-cost, high performance merchant silicon switches from multiple white box partners. This makes the physical underlay network both efficient and programmable. BCF’s overlay virtual network is programmable in the same manner as the physical underlay network, supporting consistent policy deployments in a unified cloud computing fabric.

Left to Right Ray Mota, ACG; Douglas Murray, CEO, Kyle Forster, Founder; Shaun Page, VP of Worldwide Sales

BCF’s controller is also open and modular, able to integrate with cloud management systems like OpenStack and VMware, and providing visibility from the cloud management platform into the operation of its supporting network transparently. BCF’s controller is also open for extension and integration of optimization applications like Fabric Analytics to collect traffic data and use it to perform network optimizations directly. With BCF 3.0 “Big Switch Networks is achieving an important milestone in creating open, scalable, and versatile software-driven networking for the cloud. The true logic for the unified fabric’s operation is created in the BCF Controller and propagated to all participating network elements dynamically,” states Paul Parker Johnson.

HotSeat Winner was Brocade Communications. Sanjay Munshi, Senior Director of Product Management at Brocade Communications, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG Research, discuss Brocade’s significant new network visibility product announcement: carrier-grade, physical and virtual network packet brokers, virtual TAPs, an SDN based session director and a single pane of glass management application. Sanjay highlights the challenges operators have in 4G/LTE visibility, how to address them in a cost effective manner and the critical need for new, next-generation network visibility architectures as mobile operators ramp up to virtual EPC and 5G with billions of M2M connections and Internet of Things in the not too distant future.

Left to Right, Sanjay Munshi, Senior Director of Product Management; Michael Bushong, Vice President of Product Management; Ray Mota, CEO 

The Trusted Vendor Award went to Cisco, which has continued to demonstrate operational excellence and sustainability as measured by ACG’s financial vendor index. Cisco has very high operating margins because of sales, solid gross margin, improved productivity and expense discipline; operating income increased 22.4% y-y. The company also has effective asset utilization, which yielded $3.52 for each fixed-asset dollar in 4Q15. Other operational factors contributing to Cisco receiving the award include efficient inventory management, one of the highest net cash ratios in the industry and a high receivables efficiency ratio.

Left to Right, Ray Mota and Sanjeev Mervana, Sr. Director, Cloud, Infrastructure, & Business Solutions for SPs

Ixia was awarded the Whiteboard winner category. In this video Dennis Cox, chief product officer of Ixia, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG Research, discuss the need for true 100% visibility. Today, many vendors claim to provide 100% visibility, but many drop packets and create blind spots in your application performance. Understand what is needed for true visibility and providing a secure network for optimal application performance.

Left to Right, Dennis Cox, Chief Product Officer; Ray Mota

Check out last year’s winners.

Congratulations to the 2015 Omega Award winners! 

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

Accelerating the Transformation to Virtual Network Services

The relentless pace of innovation is driving developers and service providers to redefine how they bring applications and services to users. Users’ demand for new applications is forcing a transformation away from limited function, tightly integrated and proprietary solutions toward a more fluid, programmable, adaptable service delivery environment. At the same time, competition for user engagement is fierce and operators need to find ways to become dramatically more efficient while they are also accelerating their pace of innovation.

Download Paul Parker-Johnson's whitepaper on what will fuel innovation and what F5 Networks is doing to unlock the potential in the always-on, fully-connected world and Accelerating the Transformation to Virtual Network Services.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnsoun@acgcc.com 

www.acgcc.com

Deliver Dynamic Network Services: The Business Case for Carrier SDN, Webinar

Join ACG's Paul Parker-Johnson as he and other participants discuss traditional networks and why they are not optimized to deliver the on-demand bandwidth that enterprises need today. Traditional business processes used to plan, build and operate network infrastructure present obstacles to implementing an on-demand model. Read more about ACG's study and register for the Light Reading webinar.

Date: Wednesday, November 4, 2015,
Time: 2:00 p.m. New York / 7:00 p.m. London
Sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

www.acgcc.com

SDN/NFV: Gold Rush or Fool’s Gold?

Another gold rush has brought a high level of excitement to the network infrastructure producers and consumers alike. The mad dash to SDN/NFV feels like déjà vu, for example, mid 1990s for ATM and late 1990s for MPLS. See Paul Parker Johnson’s “How SDN (Today) Is Like MPLS Was (Then).” There are huge expectations from all stakeholders to offer and implement infrastructures that reduce both capital and operational expenditures, in addition to opening new doors for rapid deployment of innovative and lucrative business services.

Intuitively, the SDN/NFV combination should reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), both capex (COTS versus purpose-built hardware) and opex (cost of provisioning and network maintenance). In evaluating TCO, there are other costs that could favor one approach versus the other.

Most often, capex savings are only discussed in terms of COTS hardware versus physical or purpose-built hardware. Basically, capex includes any upfront nonrecurring cost; that includes the cost of “network roll-out” (NRO), which is the cost of integration, testing and verification of the incremental hardware into the existing infrastructure. Unlike the cost of hardware, this cost component is not usually depreciable unless the NRO is done by the hardware vendor, and the cost is negotiated in advance. Other capex costs can include the cost of the underlying transmission network (in some countries this is leased). For NFV, the transmission network (and eventually the hardware maintenance) can be leased from the owner of the data center, which turns this cost into an opex component as it becomes a recurring cost.

A major advantage of SDN/NFV is in its opex, which gives the operators the ability to rapidly provision new services. Service roll-out is reduced by an order of magnitude of months to days. Moreover, with fast service roll-out, a new service can be tested with a limited set of customers first, and then upon favorable feedback it can be introduced to the entire target market. This can save a lot of headache (and money) later if the service turns out to be not as well received as it was expected.

Today, most infrastructures that are built on purpose-built hardware are going to stay in operation for a while and in many cases even after they are fully depreciated. Therefore, while migration to function virtualization is moving forward, operators will face a period of a “double opex” cost factor. This is not lost on anyone, and it can become a factor in delaying the decision to virtualization.

The move to virtualization requires a close study of the intermediate and long-term goals of the organization: customer needs, market penetration goals, and service offering to name a few. Although cost containment is a big factor, the revenue side of the equation must be given a much higher weight to remain competitive. After all, costs cannot go below zero, but the sky is the proverbial limit for revenue generation! And this is where SDN/NFV based infrastructures shine: rapid deployment of new and potentially lucrative services.

Click for more information about Robert Haim.

 
         Robert Haim
     rhaim@acgcc.com
       www.acgcc.com

How SDN (Today) Is Like MPLS Was (Then)

…and how reflecting on this can help navigate the path ahead in realizing the promise of the new software-defined model

A number of parallels exist between the nascent forms of software-defined networking (SDN) we are working with today and the early stages of development in a similar area of technology that began in the mid 1990s and required more than a decade of steady enhancements to become the essential part of many network deployments that MPLS is today.

By looking at these parallels we can gain some perspective on the nature of such innovations and, yes, their related upheavals, as well as inspiration for continuing to work hard on the finer points of implementation that will ultimately bring the simplified, more agile design model of SDN into wider use.

Let’s look at the parallels in point-counterpoint mode.

Today: We often say in moments of exasperation things such as there are too many forms of SDN; it will die before lift-off because the parts just won’t play with each other.

Then: In 1997 the comments were that there were too many forms of MPLS (too many ways distributing labels in a network, TDP, LDP, BGP, etc.), and how will we ever build multivendor deployments? In the end, meeting customers’ requirements whittled options down to a few basic alternatives that allowed for some choice, but ensured multivendor networks using MPLS could be built.

Today: There are too many choices for communicating with elements southbound from controllers; there is no real hope for efficiencies and scaling in control plane abstractions.

Then: In the late 90s on MPLS we said things such as there are too many choices for implementing VPNs, quality of service and traffic engineering with MPLS; we will never be able to build real service offerings. But eventually customers’ requirements brought RSVP-TE, MP-BGP, VPLS, and BGP/MPLS IP VPNs into play as means of meeting market requirements with interoperable designs.

Today: People ask, how do I monitor this (add your own euphemism) thing and dismissively assert that SDN will forever be a lab experiment unless the real-time and on-going needs of managing such software-driven solutions can be met.

Then: In the early days of MPLS we said similar things. MPLS was interesting in the lab, but it would never be adopted widely unless we solved the OA&M problem. And with the firm guidance of customers’ demands the development of mechanisms to manage MPLS networks evolved via RFC 4379, LSP ping, LSP traceroute, and other mechanisms widely employed today.

And as we speak, innovation around MPLS is not yet dead despite its widespread adoption. EVPN and Segment Routing are two cases in point for how the evolution continues.

By reflecting on these innovations and their refinement over time, we can perhaps weave in a modest amount of patience amidst the stream of developments and implementation models we are digesting with the new designs that are ushering SDN incrementally into our multidomain, multilayer, and multivendor world.

In the end it may not matter if OpenFlow, XMPP, and NETCONF coexist in portions of an otherwise abstracted control plane. It may not matter that the service management templates used in different controllers vary greatly in implementation today, as they may evolve to converge on a few basic models as customers’ deployments continue, as happened with MPLS OAM.

No doubt we are in the disruptive, chaotic, and sometimes confusing phase of innovation when it comes to SDN (for the WAN, for overlay networks, for underlay physical systems, for VNFs, etc.). But if we focus on the gains available from the architecture that have been shown in their early forms to date (flexibility in platform choice, efficiency and scale in monitoring large network systems, and acceleration of new service deployment, to name a few examples) and work on closing the gaps in the implementations that remain to be resolved for the deployments to be pursued with more confidence, we may benefit in a manner similar to the way we did from the persistence of the innovators who spawned MPLS and labored for its viable deployment in the wide array of use cases we have it deployed in today.

Click for more information about Paul Parker Johnson.

For more information about ACG’s SDN services, click here.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgresearch.net 

www.acgresearch.net

Carrier SDN: Networks as Agile as the Cloud

Operators need more agile ways to deliver network services if they’re to fully realize the benefits of cloud computing. And many see Carrier Software-Defined Networking as the way forward.

Enabling Carrier SDN

Most of us know that remarkable gains in creating and deploying new services efficiently and at scale have been made in the cloud computing community. But in the network operator community we also know that a significant impediment to delivering new services with the agility of the cloud is the rigidity of the networks we deploy and the processes we use to define and instantiate the services.

Vendors have expended a great deal of effort in recent years to enhance network flexibility. Solutions have begun to appear that address parts of the problem, but they have typically been constrained to a particular function or domain and have not actually solved the overall agile service delivery problem for networks.

I’ve just had the opportunity to study the new Alcatel-Lucent Network Services Platform (NSP) and believe it has attributes that will interest operators who aspire to deliver services in a new way by enabling Carrier SDN.

What it is

The NSP is a unified solution that creates agility in network service delivery. It brings efficiency and flexibility to the front-end problems of new service creation and the immediate downstream problems of operating those services efficiently and intelligently in a multilayer, multidomain, multivendor network. It does so in a unified and holistically designed solution.

What I liked about it

NSP breaks the OSS/BSS logjam in network service creation. It uses open RESTful APIs northbound for OSS and BSS integration and important data modeling standards and templates for network and service representation. Services and networks are represented once to multiple OSS and BSS applications, eliminating the need to define the same service multiple times to different modules so they can talk to a range of vendors’ platforms.

1. NSP associates service policies and tenant contexts with newly defined services, and applies them broadly across the target network infrastructure. We analyzed development of a new bandwidth calendaring service by a representative operator and discovered that NSP brings improvements over 50 percent in both time and resources definition compared to present modes of operation.

2. As service templates travel southbound they’re converted by a versatile mediation engine into the semantics and formats needed to work with each IP/MPLS and optical network platform being managed. This auto-conversion dramatically simplifies and streamlines the provisioning process for service offerings across network layers, vendors, and domains.

3. Communication southbound with NSP is supported by multiple important multivendor standard protocols:

• BGP-LS

• PCEP

• NETCONF

• SNMP

• OpenFlow, future, where used

Special cases for vendor CLI support are also included for simplification.

4. NSP bridges the gap between service automation and network optimization. On-demand service provisioning becomes network-aware and makes best use of available network assets during service placement. Dynamic network optimization uses network and service health to drive changes that ensure ongoing service quality and network efficiency.

5. Alcatel-Lucent has integrated functionality derived from 1,000s of operator deployments in both optical and IP/MPLS layers to enhance NSP’s value. For example, three distinct path computation engines are available to meet operator requirements:

• Packet-oriented PCE (PCE-P) for use with IP/MPLS paths

• Optically-oriented PCE (PCE-T) for use with optical paths

• Multilayer PCE (PCE-X) for use in multilayer path optimization

PCEs define paths in line with service policies at provisioning time, and KPIs are monitored in real time to determine if adjustments of any sort are called for as operations progress.

6. Alcatel-Lucent has incorporated unique and innovative algorithms for resource optimization. For instance, self-tuned adaptive routing for LSPs helps the network adapt allocations in real time according to policies and service delivery needs, producing further efficiencies and revenue-generating capacity.

The NSP seems to supply a missing link in solving the wide area network agility problem by leveraging the benefits of Carrier SDN. service providers will be interested in how its combination of functions has the right attributes for turning WANs into agile service delivery platforms. And it’s likely to be a major contributor to many operators looking to make their networks as agile as the cloud.

Click here to download Paul Parker-Johnson’s business case.

For more information about Paul Parker-Johnson, click here.

Click here for more information about ACG’s SDN service.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgresearch.net 

www.acgresearch.net

Is Tomorrow’s Cloud Operations Manager a Highly Specialized Real Estate Broker?

As the world gets driven more and more by cloud-based services, what do tomorrow’s operations jobs look like? A decade and more ago ops managers were blue chip contractors, assembling custom-tuned components into environments a well-known set of visitors could use for a prescribed set of tasks. In tomorrow’s cloud-based world the picture that’s emerging is one in which a much larger and more diverse set of visitors needs to be accommodated for purposes that vary widely depending on when and why they show up. Their expectation is that the cloud infrastructure makes a wide range of capabilities available when they need it, and that the underlying platform will be dynamically allocated to simply make it possible at that time. In this sense the new operations manager has to be aware of the capabilities of a variety of ‘venues’ (three-tiered applications, web-scale apps, elastic storage pools, etc.) and ready to let them out for exactly what the renter needs, now. The mix is larger. The versatility of functions is greater. And the client mix is constantly expanding.

In this way the operations manager of the future is partly an expert realtor who maintains a pool of properties ready to be leveraged for what each client needs, ready to be reallocated to the next one when the first one is done. The realtor gets known for the quality of the properties that are offered. And the clients get referred because the promptness of service and the versatility to support their many distinct needs has been shown. The realtor simply has to ensure the range of properties on offer continues to be value to the clients who may want to visit.

For more information about ACG’s SDN services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Click here for more information about Paul Parker-Johnson.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

acgcc.com 

New Entrants into the DCI Small Form Factor Market

Two equipment titans Coriant and Alcatel-Lucent entered the Data Center Interconnect (DCI) small form factor market with targeted packet optical networking products. Coriant added to its 7100 family of products with the 7100 Pico™ Packet Optical Transport Platform and Alcatel-Lucent added to its 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS) family of cloud optimized metro products with its 1830 PSS-4, 8, 16 optical transport platforms. Both of these devices integrate cleanly into their respective portfolios and are Software Defined Network (SDN) enabled for dynamic service instantiation.

These products are significant because they validate the need for higher performance in this growing sector of the packet optical market. Bell Labs forecasts an increase of metro traffic by 560 percent by 2017. By 2019 there will be 60 percent more data centers in the world’s metro areas and DCI volumes will increase 400 percent. Why? With cloud-based services, the industry has recognized the need for data center interconnect (DCI). Initially, service providers offering XaaS solutions were connecting customers’ data centers to service providers’ data centers.  New requirements for DCI have grown out of the operators’ needs to deploy very high-capacity, high-speed, low-latency, efficient transport between their own data center sites. In addition, rich data types such as video, multimedia mobile backhaul, cloud and data center traffic are also forcing the need for more intelligent programmability and automation in management of these traffic patterns. However, because of the size and power constraints of the metro data centers to date, platforms need to fit strategically into smaller Point of Demarcation (POD) locations with low power and high cooling requirements. This is where the DCI small form factor market emerges.

Some key specifications and product comparisons for DCI Small FF at-a-glance:

DCI Small FF Requirements	Coriant 7100 Pico	ALU 1830 PSS –4, 8, 16
4 RU Chassis or less	2 RU	PSS-4=(2 RU), PSS-8(3 RU), 16(8 RU)
DWDM w/ Tb/s fiber capacity	88 DWDM @ 10 & 100G	8 CWDM, 32 DWDM (400G – 1.6 Tb/s)
Eth, OTN, SONET	Eth, OTN, SONET	Eth, OTN, SONET
SAN (FICON, etc.)	SAN interfaces	SAN interfaces
Video (DVB, SDI, etc.)	Video interfaces	Video interfaces
40 - 100G+ ntwk interface	40G	10G, 100G, 200G
10GE – 100GE modular I/O	1, 10 , 100 GE (176 GE max)	10 , 40, 100 GE (w/112SDX11 card)
Pwr (AC or DC)	AC/DC (110/220VAC / -48VDC)	AC/DC (110/220VAC / -48VDC)
Open API/SDN mgt	Transend	SDN Enabled

ACG sees a bifurcation of the DCI market between small and multislot form factor devices. The total high-speed DCI market was approximately $400 million in 2013 and is forecasted to grow to $4 billion by 2019. Growth for the DCI small form factor is predicted to be $3 billion by 2019, 97.3 percent CAGR 2014–2019. Growth for the DCI multislot is predicted to be $1 billion by 2019, 27.1 percent CAGR 2014–2019. This market segment is growing because of ADVA, BTI, Ciena, Cisco, Cyan, ECI Telecom, Ekinops, Fujitsu, Huawei, Infinera and ZTE. Who will command the market share? Time will tell but in the meantime ACG is tracking the progress of this exciting market in its new DCI Optical Networking Market Worldwide syndication.

Contact sales@acgcc.com to find out more information or schedule a meeting with Dennis Ward and Paul Parker-Johnson to discuss this research.

Dennis Ward

dward@acgcc.com

acgcc.com

Infinera Puts Agility into Pacnet's Optical Transport Services with Its Open Transport Switch

Infinera’s announcement yesterday that Pacnet has deployed its Open Transport Switch (OTS) embedded intelligence layer into its Pacnet Enabled Network (PEN) for trans-Pacific and intra-Asian optical network services brings an innovative design into production in the fast-moving market for dynamically controlled network services.

Infinera’s OTS brings an innovative design to the table as operators’ efforts to embrace SDN move ahead. Most SDN solutions include an abstraction, or ‘adapter’ layer of software to translate consistently described templates (say, secure VPN or elastic content delivery) into semantics an underlying platform can process. This approach provides agility at the service creation and management level—in an SDN controller tier—and puts the burden of integration with the ‘not SDN-enabled’ infrastructure on the controller.

Infinera has taken an interesting tack in this evolution. Recognizing that operators have a wide range of control environments in play as they move ahead on SDN, OTS puts the ‘agility inside’ the infrastructure and allows it to support dynamic network services in a variety of northbound environments. While its first ‘connection path’ for SDN in Pacnet’s PEN is REST-based, there is no requirement for OTS to be REST-limited in all future scenarios. Underlying data models could be adapted to alternative protocol environments such as NETCONF if an operator requires that model to be used. In this way Infinera enables its DTN-X family to support dynamic controls in a variety of service control environments.

Putting ‘agility inside’ adds a refreshing level of flexibility for designers to take advantage of as they plot their course toward more fluid SDN world. OTS does not take away the value of control plane streamlining or innovations in management applications at higher layers. It simply creates the opportunity to accelerate the path to flexible service deployments operators need for data center interconnect, secure VPN, real-time content delivery, and other high-value services—the point of pursuing agility in the first place.

Will OTS evolve to support multilayer packet and optical operations in Infinera’s portfolio? Will it adapt easily to additional SDN control tiers beyond Pacnet’s REST-based PEN? We expect the odds are ‘yes’ though time will tell. In the meantime we can appreciate the innovation coming to market by introducing agility into the underlying network infrastructure that the OTS solution provides.

For more information about ACG's services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

acgcc.com 

Reshaping System Architectures: Open at Every Turn?

Disaggregated, modular, mix and match, open, these are the sound bites of the emerging white box and open software ecosystems. Will they define the architectural thinking used throughout our information-driven world moving forward?

From the Open Compute Project in data center hardware to open source software such as Open Daylight and OpenStack, the principles of ‘don’t lock me in’ and ‘let me be in charge of components I need for my best-in-class solution’ are making a play for being the dominant drivers for solution designs in nearly every network and IT platform category.

Take Cavium’s just-announced XPliant family of terabit-scale Ethernet Data Center switches as a fresh example. Its Open Compute Project design foundation means, with OCP’s Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) the switches can be used by any open networking software team to build functions that suit their needs – without being held back by the underlying hardware’s processing architecture. And, with its Open Network Install Environment (ONIE), solution designers can decide whichever network OS best suits their needs. 

Mix and match, open, see http://www.cavium.com/newsevents-Cavium-XPliant-Ethernet-Switch-Supports-the-Emerging-Open-Ecosystems.html.

In another closely related category, look at Ericsson’s Hyperscale Data Center System (HDS 8000) introduced at Mobile World Congress last week. To support an array of cloud-scale workloads, Ericsson determined it makes sense for the processor and memory elements in its HDS server ‘sleds’ (individual units) to be mixable in a manner customers decide are optimal for their needs. Each combination can be made available to the larger ‘pool’ of resources available and allocated as desired by the cloud management system in use. Each module is attached via an optical infrastructure to simplify storage and compute integration, again based on the workload’s needs.

Mix and match, modular, see http://www.ericsson.com/spotlight/cloud.

Does this ultra-modular perspective mean the era of integrated product and solution deliveries is dead? Not completely. They will be less prominent in the long run but unlikely to go completely away. For example, HP delivers its Helion OpenStack cloud computing platform as a whole system offering for which it is accountable to its customers. It includes HP and open community components. Juniper delivers its OCX 1100 Open Networking Switch as a platform full of choices about the OS a customer chooses to use in its data center for which Juniper is accountable. It includes Juniper and open community components. 

The increased role of open and modular thinking in solution deliveries is just an indication that the range of ingredients available to producers is increasing (these options were not possible 10 years ago) and the opportunity to bring them to customers in creative ways have expanded. In that sense, the line defining for whom a solution integrator works—a ‘whole system’ vendor (Cisco, Ericsson, HP); a professional services firm (Accenture, Tata); or an end customer (DT, Equinix, NTT)—is being drawn more flexibly today (and moving to the future) than was possible a decade ago. Each party can decide the amount of responsibility it thinks it should shoulder in delivering the end result. The range of options has increased.

Like many deeply rooted transitions, there are parts of this one that are sometimes messy and a bit fragile compared with the ‘certainty’ that integrated platform deliveries of the past have offered. However that fragility will likely subside in coming years as integrators of every type get more familiar with the open building blocks with which they are working, and the use cases they’re supporting put their real and natural pressure on where the boundaries of responsibility should lie for the solutions to be practical. The outcome will be a downshift in the unit cost of underlying hardware, an uptick in the amount of choice that solution integrators decide to use in their designs, and a rise in the value of the software in the solutions at every stage of deployments—from network nodes to server units to higher level applications—that support the services we decide we want to use.

That transition will undoubtedly have its jarring and its stellar moments and will take some time to occur. In the meantime as it unfolds, it’s worth paying close attention to the shifts being brought to market in line with that trajectory in offerings such as the Cavium and Ericsson solutions highlighted here.

For more information about ACG's SDN services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Click here for more information about Paul Parker-Johnson.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

acgcc.com 

Ericsson: Adding Trust + Governance to Agility in the Cloud

Periodically advances are made that propel the state of the art to a new level and allow us to accomplish things that were just not possible before.  It’s a powerful experience and is the nature of real progress.

In the steadily advancing domain of cloud computing an improvement of this sort has recently been made that could help service providers increase the security and governance of their cloud-based services by an order of magnitude. Improvement in these areas has been a gating factor holding back adoption of the cloud in many operators’ environments, and strengthening capabilities in each of them is crucial for bringing cloud offerings to market with increased confidence.

In its Hyperscale Data Center System (HDS) and Cloud System announcements at Mobile World Congress last week, Ericsson demonstrated innovation and powerful insights for success in cloud-based offerings (http://www.ericsson.com/mwc2015/launches/hyperscale-datacenter-system-ericsson-hds-8000). HDS incorporates secure storage protections, mitigating concerns about data security in the cloud. Additionally its Cloud System software incorporates an elegant policy enforcement solution that ensures governance criteria for data and software management are enforced in both development (DevOps, PaaS) and operations environments.

These two sets of innovations come from a combination of investments Ericsson has made in the past year.  Secure cloud storage in HDS is made possible by technology from CleverSafe, for secure object storage in conventional data base and web-scale ‘NoSQL’ environments.  Additional storage protections in cyber attack detection and mitigation have been integrated from Guardtime. 

The Cloud System’s governance and policy control functionality is based on Ericsson’s investment in Apcera.  Apcera’s vision, based on its founders’ experience at VMware and CloudFoundry, is to embed a rich array of policy controls into a cloud service delivery platform (in both development and operations domains) as an inherent part of the underlying software.  Application modules can be prevented from communicating with each other, and production applications can be automatically prevented from operating in the wrong deployment geography, as just two examples of governance and compliance.   

The result of these innovations is a cloud platform that takes away obstacles in security and policy enforcement that have been holding back the adoption of cloud-based services in many operators’ deployments to date.   

Will these capabilities remain unique in the market as other vendors pursue their developments in parallel?  Maybe not.  But it’s worth noting the pervasive integration Ericsson has achieved for both secure data storage and cloud system governance is not a trivial accomplishment.  To deliver similar functionality in a full solution platform for NFV, XaaS and other cloud-based offerings will take a sizable commitment from any other firm, whether startup or established.  While the market may catch up over time for the moment it’s worth putting the spotlight on Ericsson’s achievement in bringing them to market now.  The added protection and compliance available in the Cloud System offering should accelerate adoption of the virtualized network and cloud-based services significantly.

For more information about ACG's SDN services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Click here for more information about Paul Parker-Johnson.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

acgcc.com 

Delivering Policy Continuity at Scale in Cloud IT and Managed Network Services

Markets have been busy recently with announcements of solutions to help service providers benefit from powerful innovations in SDN, NFV and cloud computing systems. Solutions are emerging for fixed and mobile network environments, and for business and consumer applications. Pockets of solutions are emerging to address one part or another of an operator’s end-to-end environment, for example, increasing elasticity in mobile packet cores, simplifying business customer premise (CPE) configurations, and instantiating VNFs dynamically into cloud-based IT services.

While progress in pockets is good, designers also have to keep in mind that customer experiences exist on an end-to-end basis, at each point of consumption and across the aggregated performance of each domain involved in the service. Indeed, by embracing the cloud-based paradigm we are pursuing a goal in which services–and the policies that control them–are dynamically managed across the collection of resources that support them.

At its highest level, this is a job for service-level orchestration, for platforms that ‘think’ about a service end-to-end. Domain-specific solutions that optimize for local requirements can be integrated into a total service using northbound plug-ins and APIs. In essence a new design challenge for SPs has emerged: to optimize the mosaic of new virtual elements while still achieving a high-quality operation. How efficient (or complicated) this is depends to a degree on how efficiently the ‘gold vein’ of consistent service policies can be deployed into an end-to-end path at scale. How well an SP can do this will affect both quality of experience for the customer as well as total cost of ownership and return on investment for the SP.

One approach to mastering this challenge is to build using solutions that employ a consistent framework for managing policies across multiple domains, such as end-user CPE, wide area networks, and cloud computing data centers. The overall goal could be approached by focusing on key building blocks of the end-to-end service environment and managing its policies consistently, thereby getting a start on the overall goal. For example, managing networking resources consistently would be one way of achieving continuity at scale, at least for the network underpinning user applications. This approach requires a policy management system that aligns the network ‘northbound’ consistently with the operator’s requirements and propagates policies for enforcing those requirements in a scalable manner to each virtual element that is deployed in multiple domains.

This is an ambitious, some might say, lofty goal. Yet realizing the goal of delivering services for many individual customers on demand and at scale and with consistently orchestrated quality requires just such a far-reaching implementation.

Of the solutions that have arrived to market recently, one that embodies these attributes well is Nuage Networks’ virtualized networking portfolio. Nuage’s VNS solution (Virtualized Network Services for distributed enterprise sites) and VSP (Virtualized Services Platform for cloud-based data center services) use a common policy manager, the Virtualized Services Directory (VSD), to orchestrate policies across all of its domains. At the same time, VSD uses a consistent northbound interface to orchestrators such as OpenStack and CloudStack-based platforms. With this versatility and scale, Nuage is realizing the goal of managing an operator’s policies efficiently, on demand, and at scale to a widely distributed set of resources.

Thus, while it is possible to start transitioning infrastructures to virtualized designs one domain at a time, it is also possible to build on an architecture that consistently spans multiple domains on an end-to-end basis. In this way, an operators may simultaneously increase efficiency and increase the quality of customers’ experiences. In doing so, they would measurably accelerate their progress to delivering cloud-based services on demand across an entirely virtualized service delivery infrastructure with consistent end-to-end policy control.

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Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgcc.com 

acgcc.com 

New SDN Apps Bring a More Open Lens to the Future of Network Operations

Some vendors are starting to leverage a truly open architecture for optimization of unified fabrics with extensible service control applications.

One of the great opportunities in software-defined networking is to amplify the efficiency of network and service operations teams by allowing them to leverage a powerful set of logically centralized and abstracted control functions for the infrastructures and services they manage.

While this model is simple to articulate it takes great vision and talent to realize in the world of real, deployed solutions that deliver the result.

The goal is only partially realized by the use of SDN controllers themselves. Controllers indeed do help simplify by normalizing and abstracting control plane functions for the given domain. In parallel, though, operators are driving to achieve additional optimizations, efficiencies, and innovations by leveraging what I call SDN Service Control applications that work in tandem with the centralized SDN controller code. Examples of focus for these include traffic analytics, service level monitoring and management, and custom traffic steering design for various operating goals (application performance, service availability, cost optimization, etc.).

The dynamics for how these goals can be pursued vary a bit between internal data center and adjacent wide area network infrastructures. I focus on data center implementations here.

The end game we’re looking at is one where the logically centralized and streamlined controls for the network being managed dynamically serve the needs of the applications and users relying on it for their services. In many data centers this will include a sizable overlay virtual network running in parallel with a high-performance physical underlay network. It will include a blend of control plane and value-adding service control apps to make it all work automatically and with maximum performance, efficiency, security, and stakeholder satisfaction (phew!).

A challenge in getting to this end game is achieving these results in a streamlined, integrated manner for both underlay and overlay networks. As implementing SDN in data center environments has gotten started, we’ve largely had operationally separate deployments of underlay and overlay networks. Services such as VXLAN and virtualized router modules are operating in their own logical scopes, and a sometimes heterogeneous fabric of underlying physical network nodes is implementing its own L2 and L3 functions in parallel. Each piece can do its part on its own, but it doesn’t create an especially streamlined operational model.

Some amount of overlay and underlay integration has occurred. From the open networking point of view, a number of OpenFlow controllers have started to bring a degree of integration of underlay switches with a range of centralized control plane functions. And in a proprietary context, Cisco’s ACI framework and APIC service control system have brought a range of application policy controls to both overlay and underlay network infrastructures—the only glitch from an optimization point of view is it’s not being implemented on a fully open platform.

Neither of these early stage developments has brought a design that unlocks the potential of the open network control environment of SDN with the power of value-add that can be obtained from service control applications running in parallel with the SDN controller that have the ability to optimize both the virtual and the physical network environments according to the operator’s service delivery requirements. Most SDN controllers delivered to date open up control of either a virtual overlay or a physical underlay but not both. And while the APIC is logically elegant within its own technological silo, it’s not opening up the opportunity for streamlining to the same extent—across a heterogeneous SDN infrastructure—as a solution leveraging, say, and Open Daylight-based set of network control plane functions could.

A glimpse into a more open framework for streamlining whole data center networking fabrics has started to appear in a set of recently introduced SDN service control applications from Big Switch and Brocade. Each has the attribute of bringing a distinct set of added value to managing a data center’s SDN deployment, while leveraging the abstraction of the SDN controller as a means of streamlining the deployment of the application’s work. In this manner they have the potential of leveraging the versatility and openness of the SDN control plane for implementation of the service controls they are generating in either a virtual or a physical deployment or both.

Simplifying analytics, traffic engineering, and application policy controls in this way brings an order of magnitude increase in the level of efficiency that an operations and service management team can achieve toward the services they are managing.

Big Switch’s Fabric Analytics module and Brocade’s Volumetric Traffic Management and Path Explorer applications are each pursuing this path. Examples of implementations approaching this design have been developed in wide-area or transport SDN solutions such as Cisco’s WAE and NCS solutions and Ciena’s recently introduced Agility software suite. But in the data center the Big Switch and Brocade applications are early entrants in the market that are starting to leverage a truly open architecture for optimization of unified fabrics with extensible service control applications. Whether additional similar applications arrive in the market using a similar model in the near future will be interesting to see. But in the meantime, kudos to both suppliers for advancing the state of the art in managing open data center fabrics with the versatility and extensibility of their designs.

For more information about ACG's SDN services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgresearch.net 

ACGcc.com