EDITOR’S NOTE ENTERPRISE SDN: ARE WE THERE YET?

WHEN WILL SDN IN THE DATA CENTER GO MAINSTREAM?

HOW NETWORK FABRICS AND SDN INTERSECT IN THE DATA CENTER

Software Defining the Data CenterSDN is coming slowly, but inevitably, to the enterprise. The question is, when will it reach the data center?

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EDITOR’SNOTE

SDN in the Data Center. The Future, or Another 3-D TV?

When I think about software-defined networking in the enterprise data center, it reminds me of 3-D TVs in the consumer market.

For nearly a century, 3-D filmmaking has tried to make headway in movie theaters, start-ing with the world’s first known 3-D movie, “The Power of Love,” in 1922. Audiences wore those wacky glasses—one lens blue, the other red—to view the effect. Ever since, 3-D films make a comeback every few decades and stick around until the novelty wears off with audiences.

Then something changed in 2010. The tech-nology tried to move from the cinema to the living room. At the Consumer Electronics Show that year, 3-D HDTVs grabbed all the head-lines. The hype machine was in overdrive. It wasn’t long before 3-D TVs popped up every-where from Amazon to Wal-Mart at consumer-friendly price points. The industry expected

that home viewers would gradually adopt it like other advances in home entertainment (think VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray). But, again, it never took off—even after manufacturers found a

way to eliminate the need for glasses. It became an annual tradition to declare 3-D TVs dead, year after year.

So even if it’s not the perfect parallel to SDN, I can’t help but notice the similarities. SDN was heralded as the next rung on the evo-lutionary ladder of networking. Adoption took off quickly among cloud providers, carriers

Enterprises’ willingness to deploy software-defined networking has been tepid. Will SDN in the enterprise data center suffer the same fate as 3-D TVs, minus the special glasses?

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EDITOR’SNOTE

and large-scale Web companies. But even after vendors pivoted and innovated to appeal more to the mainstream, enterprises’ willingness to deploy SDN has been tepid, and acceptance of SDN in the data center is slower than molasses in winter. Will SDN—in the enterprise in gen-eral and in the data center in particular—suffer

the same fate as 3-D TVs, minus the special glasses? Read on to find out when and where enterprises are likely to use SDN, as well as what’s held it back. n

Jessica ScarpatiFeatures Editor, Networking Media Group

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SDN WHEN?

Enterprise SDN: Are We There Yet?

When Bruce Perrin first started shopping for SDN technology nearly seven years ago, he didn’t know what it was called. He didn’t even know for sure that it existed.

“I kept asking vendors how we could dis-engage the operations layer from the physi-cal hardware,” he says. It was a question that regularly got what he describes as a “deer in the headlights sort of stare” in return.

Perrin is chief operating officer and act-ing chief information officer of Phenix Energy Group Inc., which designs, constructs and operates oil pipelines. He became interested in virtualizing his company’s network when he saw a client lose money after buying traditional switches for a network upgrade.

“Before the implementation was complete, Cisco aged out the [switch] and ceased to support it,” he says. “The customer was left with a dead product that had never even been operational. And so my goal was to find a way

to prevent that from happening to us—where I could literally buy a white box switch from anybody and run it with a software layer.”

Perrin, however, was ahead of his time. He talked to several vendors that were develop-ing network virtualization strategies, but many were not ready for deployment. Other plat-forms abstracted network intelligence but still relied on hardware with proprietary micro-chips, limiting interoperability.

By 2013, Perrin and Phenix Group Chief Governance Officer John Becker also faced what they thought at the time was a separate problem: how to monitor and analyze increas-ingly vast amounts of critical network data. They found themselves tasked with purchas-ing 10 to 20 proprietary SPAN and tap devices at $500,000 apiece. That’s when a chance conversation with a friend led Perrin to Arista Networks.

“[Arista] said, ‘Well, we don’t actually sell

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SPAN and tap devices, but we can send you a switch and you can configure a port to be a SPAN port or a tap port,’” Perrin says. “And I said, ‘Wait a minute. How do you do that?’ They said, ‘Well, it’s a new thing that we’ve been working on for the last three years. It’s called software-defined networking.’”

The rest, as they say, is history; Perrin says he never looked back. At the beginning of this year, Phenix Group began proof-of-concept testing Arista’s Extensible Operating System, which separates the control plane from the physical network and operates on generic white box switches. Phenix plans to have a full lab environment operational by February 2016.

“It turned out that [Arista’s] software was what Amazon, Google and Microsoft were all using to run these massive networks,” Per-rin says. “They weren’t really in the enterprise space in any significant way, but [they] were making the transition there.”

That transition within SDN adoption—from carriers, cloud providers and hyper-scale Web companies to the mainstream enterprise—is underway. Instead of asking “Why SDN?”, some mainstream enterprises are starting to ask

“Why not?” Yet it is still early days, cautions Andrew Gartner, a research director at Gartner Inc.

“It’s the first pitch [in the] first inning of a seven-game World Series,” he says. “They’ve finished the anthem and the game has actually started, but it’s very, very early.”

Many of those “first inning” early adopt-ers hail from the financial services industry. Big banks, Lerner says, have many of the same challenges of performance and scale as large service providers, as well as the resources to explore new technologies. Lerner adds that he has also seen a couple of high-tech retail com-panies embrace SDN to give them an edge over competitors.

SDN is gaining traction in the enterprise, according to Lee Doyle, principal analyst at Doyle Research in Wellesley, Mass. It’s a trend he predicts will continue, with increasingly broad adoption over the next five years.

“[SDN] is a proven technology,” Doyle says. “It has a lot of good uses and it will become very widely implemented. At some point we won’t even have this conversation, because [SDN] will be the norm. But that always takes

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SDN WHEN?

longer than most technology pundits think, and certainly much longer than marketing peo-ple and suppliers will tell you.”

Evidence suggests that enterprise SDN is making its way beyond Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Earlier this year, Infonetics Research, a division of IHS Inc., surveyed 153 medium and large U.S. businesses and found that nearly 80% plan to implement SDN in the data center in the next two years. More than 60% said they will conduct or launch SDN lab trials by the end of 2015.

SDN USE CASES

One enterprise SDN adoption story recently unfolded in a somewhat unlikely setting: the Fort Bend County Library (FBCL) system in Fort Bend County, Texas. The library network first encountered SDN when it realized its outdated firewalls were failing to block illegal movie downloads. FBCL’s managed service provider suggested they try Saisei’s FlowCommand software suite, and with just a few clicks in the network management dashboard, the library was able to bring peer-to-peer BitTorrent

file-sharing to a halt.Another reason why SDN adoption made

sense for FBCL: Saisei’s suite helped manage library users’ growing appetite for bandwidth, which was creating severe bottlenecks in the network. FBCL Network Specialist Raymond Miranda describes that time as a bandwidth “free-for-all.”

“They don’t just come in with one device. They come in with their laptop, their iPhone [and] their iPad,” he says. “One patron can be coming in and hogging the whole access point…That causes congestion in our network and some frustration [among] other patrons who are also trying to connect with their device.”

And it wasn’t just patrons who suffered; con-nectivity also slowed to a crawl for the library staff, hurting productivity across 12 branches. FBCL now uses FlowCommand to allocate bandwidth by user and application, while get-ting real-time, granular insight into network congestion. For example, when the networking team learned that about 40% of total network usage was going to sites like Netflix and You-Tube, it cut back the bandwidth available for video streaming.

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“For us, it goes back to being able to [control] the usage to make sure that our staff gets what they need to do their jobs, and still utilize the same amount of bandwidth without having to ask for more funding,” says Lelia Warner, technology communications supervisor at FBCL.

THE REMAINING CHALLENGES

Even as SDN picks up steam among enter-prises, challenges remain. According to Doyle, many large companies lack a clear business case, unable to provide a compelling answer to the question: “Why SDN?” Others don’t want to invest in deployments until technologies and standards mature. Others worry about intro-ducing new security vulnerabilities or upend-ing corporate politics.

Lerner believes the greatest challenge facing SDN adoption in the enterprise is a culture of risk aversion among network buyers, pointing out that the primary metric for measuring a network professional’s performance is uptime.

“[As a networking buyer], you are going to gravitate toward solutions that provide incre-mental change and benefits versus a radical paradigm shift, which is really what SDN is,” Lerner says.

Nonetheless, he predicts that 2016 will be SDN’s “first year of pragmatic, real-world adoption” as enterprises like Phenix Group enthusiastically embrace a software-defined tomorrow. Perrin says that after the company’s SDN lab is fully operational next year, it plans to build a new SDN-based data center in Flor-ida and another in Central America, the site of the company’s current pipeline project.

“The intent in all of this is, to the greatest degree possible, to automate the whole process to get rid of the handwork—the customization that tends to result from piecemeal implemen-tation,” he says, explaining that, in addition to SDN, Phenix Group is also embracing software-defined compute, software-defined storage and software-defined WAN. “So, ultimately, our entire infrastructure becomes a software-defined technology,” Perrin says. —Alissa Irei

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MAINSTREAM

When Will SDN in the Data Center Go Mainstream?

It used to be that a data center was a unique and recognizable place, marked by certain physical attributes.

Historically it has been known for its glass walls, humming machinery, and special heat-ing, vacuum and air-conditioning equipment. As equipment has shrunk, dispersed or been hidden and as machines have become more reliable—and more virtualized—the old data center has begun to fade away.

Still, even with increasing levels of virtual-ization, many data centers remain repositories for physical infrastructure that is struggling to keep pace.

Technology trends such as cloud computing and the bring-your-own-device movement are putting pressure on IT departments to mod-ernize the data center topography to create even more flexible services with better perfor-mance and security.

The software-defined data center (SDDC)

may be central to that shift. The concept behind this approach is to bring every aspect of an IT environment to parity through virtualiza-tion. As a result, all infrastructure is delivered as a service and automated by software.

BANG FOR THE BUCK

The potential of an SDDC is apparent in the challenges for James Patterson, chief operat-ing officer of Toronto-based BPS Resolver, a software company that delivers compliance technology via software as a service. But his company wanted to focus on its product, not on supporting infrastructure, so it turned to hosting company CentriLogic to provide a home for its offerings.

For the most part, said Patterson, he has been thrilled with CentriLogic, which relies heavily on virtualization technology to sup-port shifting customer demand. But despite

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MAINSTREAM

CentriLogic’s continued effort to improve its capabilities, Patterson said, when a change in network configuration is required, unlike the near-instantaneous response for server and storage changes, it takes a lot longer to implement.

The culprit, he suspects, is the fact that virtualization technology has not yet flowed into the world of switches and routers, which still depend heavily on manual and sometimes even physical reconfiguration to adapt to new demands.

That’s why there’s a growing buzz around the concept of SDDC and a key enabler, SDN.

“Companies are beyond ready for the soft-ware-defined data center,” said Brandon Myers, an engagement manager at SWC Technology Partners, a Chicago-area IT consulting firm. “SDDC provides options to administrators that they have wanted for a long time but couldn’t afford.”

The term SDDC crystallizes the convergence of two core concepts: a fully virtualized envi-ronment and the presence of cloud computing, according to Jim Damoulakis, chief technol-ogy officer at GlassHouse Technologies, a

consulting and advisory firm in Southborough, Mass. “The main benefit of SDDC from a pri-vate cloud standpoint is its ability to deliver better efficiency, flexibility and agility,” he said.

Damoulakis said while server virtualization has created a revolution—dramatically reduc-ing server-provisioning times from weeks to hours, for example—the picture for storage, and especially for networking, has been less favorable. The net result has been to reduce overall infrastructure flexibility. The vision that SDDC represents has been to “wrap” the entire environment with automation by adding a layer of management. As a result, changes become repeatable, low effort and consistent, he said.

Damoulakis said the term software-defined data center appears to have originated with VMware Inc., the virtualization company. “They are a software firm, and software firms tend to view things in soft-ware terms,” he said. “I would prefer software-enabled [over software-defined], because software is the tool set and what you should be doing is focus-ing on solving a business problem, not simply imposing a software vision on things.” —Alan R. Earls

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INTERSECTION

How Network Fabrics and SDN Intersect in the Data Center

What is the relationship between data cen-ter network fabric and software-defined net-working? The question will become increasingly relevant as engineers begin using SDN and net-work fabrics for scalability and manageability in high-performance data centers. But vendors will offer divergent strategies in which SDN and network fabrics are either totally interde-pendent or largely independent of each other. Users will have to determine which strategy works for them.

DATA CENTER ROLES OF SDN

AND NETWORK FABRICS

Network fabrics are high-performance, low-latency, scalable Ethernet switching products that connect compute, storage and software elements in a converged network. The goal is to enable any-to-any connectivity between nodes

on the network and to allow multiple switches to be managed as one.

SDN, on the other hand, provides a software abstraction of the physical network that allows the network to be programmable and specifi-cally tied to the needs of applications. However, this software abstraction can be used in the data center to take on centralized management of multiple components, similar to network fabrics.

Now, many vendors are architecting their next-generation data center networks around both high-performance network fabrics and SDN architectures.

For most data center network applications, the underlying physical network will work in conjunction with SDN protocols to deliver a scalable, high-performance, low-latency net-work. So, the question will become this: How tightly integrated will SDN technologies and network fabrics become in the future?

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INTERSECTION

THREE SDN AND DATA CENTER

NETWORK FABRIC STRATEGIES

In one camp, the SDN architecture and network fabric technology would be purchased from separate vendors and would operate indepen-dently with some interaction. For example, the SDN software abstract could control the physical Ethernet fabric. Proponents believe using technologies that are independent of each other provides an easy-to-deploy, flexible solution that can leverage any physical network infrastructure.

At the other end of the spectrum, SDN would be fully integrated with the physical network fabric, with both being provided as a joint product or architecture from the same vendor. Suppliers offering this model include incumbents, such as Cisco, Juniper Networks and SDN startup Plexxi. The advantages of this model include the ability to offer applica-tion program interfaces that directly link applications to the network fabric, thus improving Quality of Service and reducing

latency. Integrated SDN protocols make the network fabric more application-aware and facilitate Quality of Service for specific applications.

In between the two extremes, suppliers such as IBM, Dell, NEC and HP will offer data center networking solutions where SDN software is linked to, but not dependent on, the underlying network fabric.

In this scenario, hyperscale data centers will continue to rely on Ethernet switching and routing, including network fabrics, to deliver high-performance, converged data center net-working. Within this, SDN technologies will be adopted to facilitate VM provisioning, sup-port multi-tenancy and improve application performance.

As network fabrics and SDN are deployed in the data center, their functionality will overlap and in some cases merge. Ultimately, the mar-ketplace will decide the benefits or drawbacks of integrating SDN into the physical network infrastructure. —Lee Doyle

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ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

ALAN R. EARLS is a Boston-based freelance writer focused on business and technology. Earls writes for several Tech-Target sites, including SearchBusinessAnalytics and SearchDataManagement. He has also done freelance work for publications ranging from CIO, Datamation, and Computerworld to The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tri-

bune, Modern Machining, and Ward’s Automotive.

ALISSA IREI is the site editor for SearchSDN. Prior to joining TechTarget, Irei was a lead editor at a Bos-ton-based content marketing firm and a broadcast news reporter, anchor and producer in Montana and South Carolina. She holds a master’s degree in journalism, and a bachelor’s degree in political science.

LEE DOYLE is a principal analyst at Doyle Research. Doyle Research delivers quantitative and qualitative analysis, forecasting and market positioning advice to network and IT industry professionals. Previously, Doyle was the group vice president in charge of IDC’s network infrastructure and security groups, including enterprise and data center networks. He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Williams College.

Software Defining the Data Center is a SearchSDN.com e-publication.

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