Industry voice: Software-defined networking: business hype or game changer?

The world is littered with technologies that once seemed promising but ultimately failed to transform our personal lives or businesses. In some cases the technology was flawed or prohibitively expensive, and in others it was simply a matter of a lack of support from other industries.

3D television, for example, has been hyped as providing an immersive viewing experience, and yet it has made only limited inroads into living rooms throughout the world.

Lack of programming and reluctance among viewers to wear the requisite glasses has stunted the growth of this promising industry, while other innovations such as tablets have taken society by storm.

If television viewers are hesitant to spend a few hundred extra dollars for a feature that might ultimately be useless, businesses are equally reluctant to spend hundreds of thousands on revamping their data centres without good reason.

And yet with words like "the cloud" and "virtualisation" making their way up the corporate ladder over the last decade, it's impossible to ignore the march of technical progress.

The latest of these buzzwords is software-defined networking (SDN). But is SDN merely another expensive addition to the data centre, or is it really a disruptive new way of architecting network functions?

SDN as a Game Changer

SDN allows different network elements to be managed by software through the separation of the control and forwarding planes of the network. Application programming interfaces (APIs) bring network functions together under the control of specialised software, and changes to functionality no longer require physical adjustments to the infrastructure.

Functions such as load balancing which once required dedicated devices can now be performed by software running on generic server hardware, and applications requiring different configurations can be housed on the same systems without compatibility problems.

SDN simplifies physical network infrastructure and centralises management of traffic and application delivery. Administrators can quickly shift resources from one area of need to another as they deal with changing business requirements, reducing redundant and underutilised network elements.

SDN as a Stepping Stone

While SDN is already proving its worth to a number of organisations running very large networks, it should not be viewed as something to adopt for its own sake.

Rather, it is a necessary intermediate step that leads to a more foundational shift in IT: the software-defined data centre (SDDC). As more individual hardware functions are transitioned to software, the natural progression is to eventually virtualise the entire data centre.

SDDC is the outcome of a pattern already familiar to IT administrators that began with server virtualisation. It isn't just about multiplexing several workloads across general-purpose machines.

More importantly, a server virtualisation offers an abstraction that's just right for the data centre: provisioning, moving, snapshotting, and rolling back are thorny in hardware, but easy in software. A "software-defined computer" changes the operational model and streamlines management of workloads.

Next on the virtualisation path were desktop computers. These have traditionally required manual installation of each software program a user needs. Over the last decade, however, applications have been streamed to users from internal servers or even been provided online as web-based applications.

Now completely virtualised machines are commonplace, where even the underlying operating system actually resides on a server outside the user's physical machine.

Virtualisation proliferates

Now, virtualisation is coming to the network. Networks have been built with various kinds of limited virtualisation for some time now. Virtual LANs allow physically separated network segments to be grouped logically, and virtual switches allow a single server to mediate traffic between multiple virtual machines. Yet full-scale network virtualisation is still in its infancy.

A fully virtualised network would bring together all the disparate segments, access control lists, forwarding and shaping policies, and other elements into one portable software abstraction.

This network will completely decouple the physical network from its virtual elements, with the scope of the control plane moving beyond an individual router or switch to be fully controlled by software.

From the point of view of applications and operating systems, a virtual network functions in exactly the same way as a physical network–no special configuration "above" the network is necessary.

Virtualisation has certainly proven its worth. SDDC represents a kind of "full scale" virtualisation that provides benefits in three crucial areas:

Efficiency: In any complex machine, the more parts that are introduced, the greater chance that one will break and take down the entire system. SDDC allows the physical network to be streamlined, so resources can be shared even between applications – including those with differing requirements.

Security: High-profile attacks on businesses seem to be happening on an increasing basis, and as networks become more complicated there are more points for malicious parties to attack. In an SDDC, network control is consolidated and centralised, which provides a greater degree of visibility into network behaviour and control over security.

Cost-effectiveness: With budgets constantly shrinking, IT administrators are regularly tasked to accomplish more with fewer resources. Generic "white box" SDN-capable equipment is often much less expensive than traditional gear, reducing capital expenditures as well as ongoing maintenance costs.

Preparing for the Future

For many businesses, a true SDDC will be some distance off. But they should still set their sights on what they hope to achieve in the coming years, in order to make decisions now that will later aid that transition.

Organisations should adopt the right infrastructure elements early, and begin to implement virtualisation and SDN as they are able, which will help them progress toward a fully virtualised data center.

The SDDC will be a game-changing shift in IT, and those that have seen it coming – and have prepared themselves – will be able to realise the benefits sooner. Those organisations will gain a competitive advantage over those who are still waiting to make sure the SDDC isn't another 3D television frivolity.

• Brent Lees is Senior Product Manager at Riverbed Technology.

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