14
SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKING
SDN:
a viable option
Ranga Rajagopalan,
CTO, Avi Networks
www.avinetworks.com
Software-defined load balancers are now as robust
and significantly more cost-effective than traditional
hardware or virtual appliances
The last five years have seen dramatic increases in the levels
of encrypted traffic on the Internet. It’s estimated that over
50% of all Internet traffic is now encrypted, and the use of
encryption is no longer confined to highly sensitive data. The
proliferation of cyberattacks, as well privacy concerns in the
same period, have meant that even the likes of Netflix are
now encrypting movies that are streamed online. All of this
inevitably has an impact on networks and those managing
them. And there’s huge pressure as network administrators
look to lessen this pressure, while keeping up with security and
network performance requirements.
Load balancing
Taking the burden of this increase in encrypted traffic is the
load balancers in the network. One of the core functions of
the load balancer is to take the SSL/TLS encrypted packets,
offload or decrypt them before they reach the application.
This obviously takes a solution that’s robust enough
to handle a large amount of encrypted traffic, and the
processing power required to decrypt it on the fly. Up until
recently it was thought that the only option available was a
purpose-built hardware appliance with processors and chips
designed to meet throughput or transactions-per-second
(TPS) requirements. This does deal with the issue, although
the upfront investment in huge amounts of hardware that
remains mostly underutilised to deal with the temporary
spikes in traffic has become troublesome for the majority
of organisations.
Capital investment tied up in hardware that for a
majority of the time is simply lying dormant, in a ‘just-in-
case’ scenario, is simply no longer acceptable for many
organisations. Budgets are generally at least under pressure,
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