Promotion | TECHNOLOGY
SDN Gets the Network Out of the Way
Software Defined Networking removes the last barrier to business agility. The increase in efficiency and cost-effectiveness can be extraordinary. By Je ff Doyle
SDN is about getting the network out of the way of applications.” — Sunil Khandekar CEO, Nuage Networks
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Software defined networking (SDN) aims usiness agility is more than just a buzzword. Success means delivering to remove network barriers and bring about services and adjusting to changing fully virtualized data centers that efficiently move and change with the market condidemands of your business. tions faster than your For a company “SDN is about getting the competition, as well as network out of the way realizing cost efficiencies employing of applications,” says Sunil that you can pass on to thousands of Khandekar, CEO of Nuage your customers. Networks. “It’s about makEnterprises of all sizes developers, making ing the network easily conare moving their applithem just 10% to sumable by applications by cations to cloud models to achieve IT agility: 15% more efficient making it programmable and highly automated. It’s versatile demand-based results in huge about abstraction of netser ver and storage capacities, utility-based operational savings. work capability and the automation of network pay-as-you-go billing, provisioning.” and flexible, developerfriendly resources. But the relatively static networks interconnecting compute and storage SDN and Operational Efficiency elements limit the potential of data centers to The costs of operating a network have both meet business needs. financial and time dimensions. Khandekar
explains that moves, adds and changes in today’s networks are done by committee. “There’s the LAN, WAN and VLAN teams and the sys admin. There’s the auditing and compliance team and the firewall and appliances teams. They all have to review the changes to be made, and then schedule a maintenance window. It’s just a crazy amount of time required, and even after that, you’re not guaranteed error-free provisioning of the network.” SDN’s programmability links policy templates to applications, and then applies the templates as application demands change. The result is sharply reduced deployment times and increased consistency and predictability. Instead of adapting applications to the limits of network flexibility and deployment lead times, an SDN responds in real time to application demands. And as the dynamics of virtualized compute and storage change, the network changes with them.
The key is tying the network into the same orchestration systems that control compute and storage, and adding a directory of virtualized services that tracks policies, analytics and business logic. For a company employing thousands of developers, making them just 10% to 15% more efficient results in huge operational savings. Nuage Networks is already demonstrating reduced operational expenses to its customers. “We’ve demonstrated that we could effectively have close to a 50% reduction in OpEx, up to 10 times improvement in turn-up and response time, and up to a 40% increase in asset utilization,” Khandekar says.
SDN and CapEx Savings
Improved asset utilization is an essential factor in reducing capital expenditures, too. Data center virtualization has already increased server utilization by spreading workloads more efficiently across available resources. Virtualizing network elements, from routers and switches to firewalls, load balancers and cache engines, promises the same levels of resource sharing. Current network practices can be thought of as hardware-defined networking. Reconfiguration involves “touching” each network device and interacting with a vendorspecific operating system and command line interface. Introducing new features or increasing performance can mean expensive rip-and-replace projects. SDN promises much simpler, much faster, more incremental network upgrades through the addition of software elements instead of hardware elements. Most important, improved resource sharing means you can run longer on the network you have.
Democratizing the Network
SDN grew out of academic networks, where researchers wished to develop custom network functions specific to their needs. This continues to be the promise of SDN: It reduces dependency on vendor development cycles, and your network becomes purpose-built to support your unique business dynamics. Khandekar calls it democratizing the network. “SDN means disruptive innovation,” he says. “Rather than preserve the legacy of the hardware platform, we’ve virtualized it and offered a sophisticated networking capability, and then democratized that by bringing it to enterprise networking.” n
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Nuage Networks delivers NOW to datacenter networks for the cloud era. NOW is virtualization & automation that transforms your network from a barrier to an engine of opportunity. It’s effortless connection, for thousands of applications. NOW is a network that’s more responsive, programmable and unconstrained. What’s more, NOW isn’t coming tomorrow. NOW is here today.
Contact us to see how we can transform your network to meet the demands of any application, any cloud, every time. w w w. nuag e n e t wo r ks . n e t