FEATURE: SDN
Why has SDN emerged as such an important
part of any enterprise network?
All this connectivity is undergoing a major paradigm
shift. Servers, storage, and applications have become
virtualized, enabling the rapid growth of the cloud.
Networks are next up for virtualization. The router-
heavy, hard-coded, inflexible networks of the past
simply cannot support digital services, nor the
mobility of the masses, nor the rapid rise of data in
today’s hyper-complex IT environments.
SDN is an innovative architectural model that
enables automated provisioning, network
virtualization, and network programmability for
enterprise and cloud datacentres. It is however a
datacentre-focused networking solution. So, this
raises the question about the wide area networks
(WANs) that connect all these software-defined
datacentre networks with widely distributed and
mobile users.
Ravi Mali, director regional sales, Ciena
Today’s network managers grapple with a myriad
of challenges: finding and resolving problems and
bottlenecks, improving application performance, and
being able to roll out new applications and services
quickly. Couple all this with the ongoing pressure to
keep costs down while continuing to innovate and
evolve business operations.
These challenges are only going to grow in
magnitude, as more ICT services move into the
cloud and more and more ‘things’ connect to the
internet and start generating reams of data. Today’s
organisations need a new kind of network, one that
is more flexible and agile, where new services can
be added quickly, problems can be easily identified
and resolved, and there is greater interoperability
between vendor solutions. SDN is a bold new
approach to network architecture that enables the
network to be intelligently and centrally controlled,
or ‘programmed’, using software applications.
This enables management of the entire network,
regardless of the underlying network technology.
What’s needed is an end-to-end software-defined
connectivity infrastructure for the entire enterprise,
with virtualized functions that can be orchestrated
across cloud networks, remote LANs, and hybrid
WANs. Software-defined wide area networking,
or SD-WAN, offers a new and better approach to
networking across the global enterprise. There is
tremendous pent-up demand for this new approach:
IDC expects the worldwide SD-WAN market to grow
from less than $225 million in 2015 to more than $6
billion in 2020.
What are the advantages of SDN over
traditional networking architecture?
Ravi Mali, director regional sales, Ciena
SDN enables network operators to take control of
their networks, accelerating the speed of innovation,
simplifying and automating operations, and
elevating the customer experience. Benefits come
from four critical technologies.
First is programmability. SDN enables network
behaviour to be controlled by software. As a result,
network operators can tailor network behaviour.
Operators can introduce innovative, differentiated
new services rapidly - free from the constraints of
Charbel Khneisser, Regional Presales Director, METNA closed and proprietary systems.
at Riverbed
Secondly, SDN logically centralises network
intelligence. In traditional networks, control is
Cloud computing is one of the main drivers of
distributed and devices function autonomously with
the growing demand in the region for more and
limited awareness of the global state of the network.
faster connectivity.
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