CAIRO, Egypt, 18th November, 2015:
SDN is still at an early stage in Egypt. The growth in the SDN market
will be driven by companies working towards solving existing problems
with networks – security, robustness and manageability and by innovating
new revenue generating services on network infrastructures. Ultimately,
the goal is to provide a highly flexible, cloud-optimized network
solution that is scalable within the cloud. In our view, this “new”
network will be powered by fabric-based architectures, which provide the
any-to-any connectivity critical to realizing the full benefits of SDN.
These include network virtualization, programmatic control of the
infrastructure, automation and dynamic configuration, on-demand service
insertion and pay-per-use, all through standards-based software
orchestration tools. Cloud service deployment will be faster, data
centre management will be simpler and network operation will be easier.
Yarob Sakhnini, regional director, MEMA at Brocade says
many network operators expect the near-term benefits of SDN to be
operational in nature: greater management efficiency, fewer
interoperability challenges, possible OpEx reduction. However, the
original promise of SDN—faster, custom innovation through
programmability—provides new opportunities for rapid service innovation
and monetization for organizations with the resources and processes in
place to develop and deploy them. Not surprisingly, SDN has seen early
adoption in service providers and large enterprises with early-adopter
IT cultures and active cloud deployments. On the other hand, smaller
organizations with very finite infrastructure resources and staff are
using SDN to manage traffic spikes and large flows in more efficient
ways.
Many organizations in
the country think of SDN as being solely for large-scale data centres or
that it is just is not ready for prime time. The fact of the matter is
that SDN is suitable for all levels of data centres, making
configuration, management and monitoring a much simpler task, thus
requiring less IT manpower. This is an even more critical concern in
smaller organizations without the IT infrastructure of a huge business.
SDN is more than just hype or beta technology at this point, It is well
established in production environments and is being shipped regularly by
major networking vendors.
The nature of the
network an organisation has in place often dictates the speed and manner
in which they can adopt SDN. Simple, small-scale networks often seen in
SMEs can more easily implement SDN across the network because of their
size and a lack of complexity. They often tend to be heterogeneous,
meaning they are not tied to a particular vendor. In these heterogeneous
networks there is lots more flexibility and choice for IT managers to
mix and match technologies that suit their current and future
requirements. SMEs, through their use of SDN strategies, have created
flexible, intelligent and efficient networks that act as the proof
points for the technology’s deployment at enterprise level. For
enterprise networks, particularly those with multiple data centres and
offices spanning more than one country, it is less common for the
network to be heterogeneous and therefore less likely that SDN can be
quickly and easily implemented.
While it’s less simple
to deploy SDN across an enterprise network where there are existing
agreements with a homogeneous vendor, it’s still possible to use SDN
strategically in targeted areas in the network. For IT departments in
large or enterprise environments looking to implement networking
strategies that include SDN and NFV, there are several roads businesses
can take that don’t require a complete infrastructure overhaul. Often,
IT departments start by deploying SDN in specialised places in the
network, particularly when they have legacy equipment that isn’t
heterogeneous and is tied to a specific provider. For enterprises, we
imagine that within a year it will be easier to access the kind of
‘shrink-wrapped’ SDN solutions they will need to deploy it strategically
across the business, however in the short term we’re seeing these
small-scale, specialist deployments, often controlled within the
hypervisor, which afford network reliability and efficiency where it’s
really needed.
SDN will enable a wide
variety of use cases as the technologies mature. In the near term, here
are some of the most commonly envisioned scenarios and SDN benefits:
Service assurance through flow optimization in the Wide Area Network (WAN):
Public cloud providers may wish to ensure their SLAs by maintaining
visibility and control of traffic all the way to the client’s network
edge. This can be achieved by deploying SDN-enabled devices both at the
cloud provider edge and client ingress, with both devices communicating
to the cloud provider SDN controllers. SDN can also help provide
granular control of interdata center traffic, including backup or
disaster recovery operations.
Improved security:
Administrators can predefine per-user access policies in Zero-Trust
environments. Global threat thresholds can be implemented via an SDN
controller and automatically monitored across disparate network and
security systems, with predefined remediation actions.
Service improvement and velocity through easily orchestrated virtual network services:
By defining, within the controller, a set of policies that can be
applied to configure virtual network functions, the operator is able to
truly divorce the service delivered to the client from the limitations
of the infrastructure that supports it. The SDN controller can be
programmed to support large, known or predictable, flows or to quickly
bring new physical or virtual devices online in the event of spikes,
without increasing demand on limited administrator time.
Service differentiation through rapid customization:
The ability to develop new features quickly for highly specialized use
cases appeals to many, particularly in the cloud and hosting space, as
it can provide opportunities for timely service differentiation and
incremental monetization of the network. Such use cases might take the
form of new security offerings, service levels, or bandwidth on demand.
Making the move to SDN
SDN introduces new
concepts that we did not have at our disposal a few years ago. So
building and designing network platforms with SDN using the same
concepts and architectures of yesteryears defies the benefits of SDN.
Organizations need to step outside the traditional way of designing
network platforms to unlock the true power of SDN.
When selecting an SDN
solution, decision makers need to be aware of the risks that integrated
proprietary stacks introduce. Considering open components that are
developed by cooperating members and/or standards bodies has many
advantages. These advantages manifest themselves most prominently in the
freedom of integrating a best of breed solution and not relying on
building a very complex platform from a single vendor that may or may
not have all the best components.
While organizations
could replace their entire networking infrastructure with an SDN-enabled
environment overnight, that certainly isn’t a requirement for a
successful SDN deployment. There are any numbers of ways to migrate from
a traditional networking infrastructure to SDN. SDN easily coexists
with existing networking technologies, and stepped process
implementation can ease anxiety. A key consideration is the
interoperability of the SDN components with the existing networking
hardware components.
Today SDN is an
evolving technology and considerable care should be taken not only when
buying SDN components, but also when buying hardware components. These
hardware components that organizations are deploying today should have a
very clear support and future proofing when enterprises need to deploy
SDN.
SDN will be replacing
some of the functionalities that were built into networking hardware so
network platform designers need to take into consideration the
performance and functionalities of some of these SDN solutions, to at
least meet or exceed the performance of many proprietary hardware based
solutions. Some of these functionalities touch the security aspects.
Virtualizing your network infrastructure does not mean dropping your
guard against the rising tide of application threats, data leakages, and
security breaches. So while evaluating SDN solutions, the level of
security that the SDN solution brings to the table is important.