Category Archives: SDN

Radisys and Sanctum create SDN solution to lost revenue

Network Function VirtualisationService accelerator Radisys is working with software defined networking (SDN) specialist Sanctum Networks to create a carrier-class cloud service that can support communication service providers (CSPs) worldwide.

The SDN cloud was built by combining Sanctum’s Jupiter SDN Controller with Radisys’ FlowEngine Intelligent Traffic Distribution System. Together they aim to create a software defined infrastructure powerful enough to identify, provide and support instant network service offerings with complete visibility.

Using this foundation, the partners say, CSPs will have a much better chance of redefining and improving the subscriber experience and guaranteeing a better of level of service. Software defined networking will also create more options for new over the top services for mobile telcos looking for new revenue streams, the collaborators claim.

The cloud is built on Sanctum’s intelligent SDN orchestrator and FlowEngine’s programmable data plane processor. The system can optimise service delivery in real-time as demands change and also unifies data across many silos, claims Joseph Sulistyo, director of product management and strategy, Radisys. Success hinges on how enthusiastically the network administrators take to the system and get the full use out of it, according to Sulistyo. “Sanctum Networks has developed a well-designed user interface and dynamic network programming model,” said Sulistyo.

Mobile telcos need somebody to remove the complexity of cloud service delivery in real-world deployments, explained Nazneen Shaikh, vice president of product management at Sanctum Networks. “CSPs can improve service visibility into their network, while ensuring carrier-grade reliability, scale and performance,” said Shaikh.

The billing, network and application data at many mobile operators is all over the place, according to Ravi Palepu, senior director of global telco solutions at revenue management specialist Virtusa. “As a consequence many telcos are either losing revenue by under billing, or losing customers by over billing,” said Palepu, “anything that unifies the data could help telcos identify where they are losing money.”

How to Prepare Your Environment for the Software Defined Networking Era

In preparation for my upcoming webinar, here is another video  I did a few months back around how to prepare your environment for software defined networking. Regardless of which SDN solution you choose, there is a lot of backend work that needs to be done. Before you get into the weeds around specific products, you need to take a step back. To be successful, you’re going to need to have a level of understanding about your applications you’ve never needed before. I will cover this briefly in my webinar, but if you are planning on attending, this is a good one to watch first to help set the stage.

Register for Nick’s webinar, “VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: When to Use Each, When to Use Both.” In the webinar, Nick will cover:

  • The current state of the SDN market
  • VMware NSX & Cisco ACI overview
  • When it makes sense to use each, or even both
  • Next steps to get your environment prepared for SDN initiatives

By Nick Phelps, Principal Architect

How to Prepare Your Environment for the Software Defined Networking Era

In preparation for my upcoming webinar, here is another video  I did a few months back around how to prepare your environment for software defined networking. Regardless of which SDN solution you choose, there is a lot of backend work that needs to be done. Before you get into the weeds around specific products, you need to take a step back. To be successful, you’re going to need to have a level of understanding about your applications you’ve never needed before. I will cover this briefly in my webinar, but if you are planning on attending, this is a good one to watch first to help set the stage.

 

 

Register for Nick’s webinar, “VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: When to Use Each, When to Use Both.” In the webinar, Nick will cover:

  • The current state of the SDN market
  • VMware NSX & Cisco ACI overview
  • When it makes sense to use each, or even both
  • Next steps to get your environment prepared for SDN initiatives

 

By Nick Phelps, Principal Architect

VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: Which SDN solution is right for me?

I posted this video a while back on VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI and it’s proven to be a pretty popular topic. I will be holding a webinar on 10/6 to talk about this topic in more detail so I figured I would repost the video for people to view again. If you enjoy this video, I would highly recommend registering for the webinar. I’ll be able to go in more detail and answer any questions throughout the presentation.

If you missed Nick’s webinar, you can download it here!

By Nick Phelps, Principal Architect

VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: Which SDN solution is right for me?

I posted this video a while back on VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI and it’s proven to be a pretty popular topic. I will be holding a webinar on 10/6 to talk about this topic in more detail so I figured I would repost the video for people to view again. If you enjoy this video, I would highly recommend registering for the webinar. I’ll be able to go in more detail and answer any questions throughout the presentation.

 

Register for Nick’s Webinar, “VMware NSX vs. Cisco ACI: When to Use Each, When to Use Both.” In the webinar, Nick will cover:

  • The current state of the SDN market
  • VMware NSX & Cisco ACI overview
  • When it makes sense to use each, or event both
  • Next steps to get your environment prepared for SDN initiatives

 

 

By Nick Phelps, Principal Architect

CloudBolt adds SDN, containerization and support

Network Function VirtualisationVirtual appliance maker CloudBolt Software now offers better support for microservices, software defined networking (SDN) and containerization on its platform. It is also offering compatibility with a variety of container services, it has announced.

According to CloudBolt its customers can now virtualize their networks with access to VMware NSX directly through its system. There is also new additional support for Docker and Kubernetes for customers wishing to use application containerization. The addition of new support capacity for IBM SoftLayer, HP Helion and CenturyLink Cloud means that there are now 13 cloud platforms compatible with CloudBolt.

The addition of Docker and Kubernetes marks the first time that any form of microservices management has been available on Cloudbolt’s system. The new compatibility with VMware NSX will allow customers to spin up virtual environments within the CloudBolt platform, explained CEO Jon Mittelhause. This means they can now use software defined networks and networks function virtualisation to simplify network configuration and management. The newest incarnation of CloudBolt also extends support for OpenStack and Cloud Foundry.

Meanwhile, widening the choice of cloud environments available to customers gives CloudBolt clients more options for locations from which to configure and publish capacity through the CloudBolt service catalogue, it says. New sites are available in Canada, India, Italy and Mexico.

News of the product upgrade follows a strategic decision to move the company’s corporate headquarters from Washington, DC to Silicon Valley in California as it seeks extra funding. Yesterday the 2015 Global Venture Capital Confidence Survey compiled by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) suggested that investors are most likely to put funds behind Silicon Valley start ups.

CloudBolt, founded in 2011, recently received an additional $2 million in funding from investors in a bid to cater to rising demands from customers.

“In the past year, we have seen a marked increase in the number of enterprises that want the benefits of SDN and container technologies,” said Mittelhauser, “the latest version of CloudBolt should make it easier and cheaper for enterprises to reap the benefits of these technologies.”

Networking the Future with SDN

SDN will be vital for everything from monitoring to security

SDN will be vital for everything from monitoring to security

The nature of business is constantly changing; customers are demanding faster, more responsive services, and as a result, firms need to ensure that their backend technology is up to scratch. Increasing adoption of the cloud, mobility and big data technologies has encouraged the IT department to address how they can best support these developing trends whilst benefiting the customer and employee experience.

By looking at the heart of their infrastructure, the network, businesses can provide more agile and flexible IT services that can quickly meet user demand.  So what improvements can be made to the networks to satiate customer demand?

A software defined network (SDN) is emerging as an obvious approach for technology decision makers, empowering them to provide a faster, more agile and scalable infrastructure. SDN is considered the next evolution of the network, providing a way for businesses to upgrade their networks through software rather than through hardware – at a much lower cost.

SDN provides holistic network management and the ability to apply more granular unified security policies whilst reducing operational expenses such as the need to use specific vendor hardware and additional technology investments. In fact, IDC recently predicted that this market is set to grow from $960 million in 2014 to more than $8 billion by 2018, globally.

A Growing Trend

Datacentres and service providers have, until now, been the most common adopters of SDN solutions. As a result there has been a notable improvement in better customer service and faster response times with firms deploying new and innovative applications quicker than ever. In the past year, we have seen firms in sectors like healthcare and education take advantage of the technology. However, while SDN is developing quickly, it is still in its early stages, with several industries yet to consider it.

There is a focus to encourage more firms to recognise the benefits of SDN in the form of the OpenDaylight Project. The OpenDaylight Project is a collaborative open source project which aims to accelerate the adoption of SDN – having already laid the foundation for SDN deployments today, it is considered to be the central control component and intelligence that allows customers to achieve network-wide objectives in a much more simplified fashion. The community, which includes more than a dozen vendors, is addressing the need for an open reference framework programmability and control enabling accelerated innovation for customers of any size and in any vertical.

Driving Business Insights

Looking ahead to the future for this new way of networking, there are a number of ways SDN can benefit the business. For example, SDN looks set to emerge as the new choice for deploying analytics in an economical and distributed way – in part due to the flexible nature of its infrastructure and the growing prominence of APIs – as the SDN optimized network can be maintained and configured with less staff and at a lower cost.

Data analytics-as-a-service is being tipped as the vehicle that will make big data commoditised and consumable for enterprises in the coming years; analyst house IDC found that by 2017, 80% of the CIO’s time will be focused on analytics – and Gartner predicts that by 2017 most business users and analysts in organisations will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis themselves.

However, the right network environment will be key so that data analytics has the right environment to flourish. An SDN implementation offers a more holistic approach to network management with the ability to apply more granular unified security policies while reducing operational expenses. Being able to manage the network centrally is a huge benefit for firms as they look to increase innovation and become more flexible in response to changing technology trends.

Using analytics in tandem with a newly optimized SDN can empower IT to quickly identify any bottlenecks or problems and also help to deploy the fixes. For example, if a firm notices that one of their applications is suffering from a slow response time and sees that part of the network is experiencing a lot of latency at the same time, it could immediately address the issue and re-route traffic to a stronger connection.

Realising the Potential of SDN

In order to implement an SDN solution, it will be imperative for enterprises to firstly make themselves familiar with the technology and its components, create cross functional IT teams that include applications, security, systems and network to get an understanding what they wish to achieve and secondly, investigate best-of-breed vendor solutions that can deliver innovative and reliable SDN solutions which leverage existing investments without the need to overhaul longstanding technologies. This way, businesses can reap the benefits of SDN whilst saving time as well as money and mitigate risk.

Using analytics and SDN in combination is just one future possibility which could make it far simpler for businesses to deploy servers and support users in a more cost-effective and less resource-intensive way. It can also provide an overall improved user experience. With SDN offering the power to automate and make the network faster and big data providing the brains behind the operation; it’s an exciting match that could be an enterprise game changer.

Written by Markus Nispel, vice president of solutions architecture and innovation at Extreme Networks

Ericsson sets up cloud lab in Germany

Ericsson is boosting R&D in cloud

Ericsson is boosting R&D in cloud

Ericsson has set up a lab that will see it work with operators and enterprises to demo, test and verify cloud-based services. The move comes just two months after the networking vendor set up a similar lab in Italy.

The company said the lab will focus on helping customers develop cloud migration, governance, security and data integrity competencies. It plans to offer access to in-house cloud technology experts as well as its growing portfolio of cloud technology.

”By developing these cloud solutions in cooperation with our customers, we will provide them the opportunity to speed up the deployment of cloud technology,” said Valter D’Avino, Ericsson’s head of Western & Central Europe.

“This means we will more quickly experience the benefits of cloud, such as shorter time to market for new services within Internet of Things for example, and a more agile IT infrastructure.”

The move comes just a couple of months after Ericsson set up a similar lab in Rome, Italy, focused on stimulating development of multi-vendor SDN and NFV solutions that primarily address the needs of telcos.

The recently announced lab is part of a much broader shift into the enterprise ICT world and outside its traditional customer base.

China Mobile revamps private cloud with Nuage SDN

China Mobile, Alcatel Lucent and their respective subsidiaries are working together on SDN in many contexts

China Mobile, Alcatel Lucent and their respective subsidiaries are working together on SDN in many contexts

China Mobile’s IT subsidiary Suzhou Software Technology Company has baked Nuage Networks’ software-defined networking technology into its private cloud architecture to enable federation across multiple China Mobile subsidiaries. The move comes the same week both parent companies – China Mobile and Alcatel Lucent – demoed a virtualised radio access network (RAN), a core network component.

The company deployed Nuage’s Virtualised Services Platform (VSP) and Virtual Services Assurance Platform (VSAP) for its internal private cloud platform in a bid to improve the scalability and flexibility of its infrastructure, and enable infrastructure federation between the company’s various subsidiaries.

Each subsidiary is allocated its own virtual private cloud with its own segmented chunk of the network, but enabling infrastructure federation between them means underutilised assets can be deployed in other parts of the company as needed.

“China Mobile is taking a visionary approach in designing and building its new DevOps private cloud architecture,” said Nuage networks chief executive officer Sunil Khandekar.

“By combining open source software with Nuage Networks VSP, China Mobile is replacing and surpassing its previous legacy architecture in terms of power, sophistication and choice. It will change the way China Mobile operates internally and, ultimately, the cloud services they can provide to customers,” Khandekar said.

The move comes the same week China Mobile and Alcatel Lucent trialled what the companies claimed to be the industry’s first virtualised RAN, which for an operator with over 800 million subscribers has the potential to deliver significant new efficiencies across its datacentres if deployed at scale.

OpenDaylight launches third open source SDN platform, announces advisory group

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

The OpenDaylight project has released the third version of its open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform, Lithium, as the organisation launches an advisory tasked with feeding technical insights learned through deployment back into the developer community.

The OpenDaylight Project is an open source collaboration between many of the industry’s major networking incumbents on the core architectures enabling software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV).

The community is developing an open source SDN architecture and software, the latest release of which has been dubbed Lithium, that supports a wide range of protocols including OpenFlow, the southbound protocol around which most vendors have consolidated.

“End users have already deployed OpenDaylight for a wide variety of use cases from NFV, network on demand, flow programming using OpenFlow and even Internet of Things,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight.

“Lithium was built to meet the requirements of the wide range of end users embedding OpenDaylight into the heart of their products, services and infrastructures. I expect new and improved capabilities such as service chaining and network virtualization to be quickly picked up by our user base,” Jacques said.

The organisation said Lithium boats a number of improvements over the previous release of its platform, Helium, like increased scalability, native support for OpenStack Neutron, new security, monitoring and automation features, support for more APIs and protocols including Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).

“We see OpenDaylight as a powerful platform for carrier-grade SDN solutions, which is getting more feature-rich with every release,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president, NFV Product Management, HP and OpenDaylight Project board member. “ConteXtream, now an HP Company, has been active in the OpenDaylight community since its inception and has made significant contributions to Service Function Chaining, an important capability for NFV. We look forward to our continued involvement in the OpenDaylight project to help enable widespread adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for NFV.”

The move comes the same week the project announced the formation of the OpenDaylight Advisory Group (AG), a group composed mostly of telcos tasked with providing technical input to the OpenDaylight developer community based on deployment experience.

The twelve founding members of the advisory group include researchers and specialists from China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telefónica I+D, AT&T, Orange, and Comcast.

The organisation said the advisory group was set up to help provide technical and strategic guidance to the steering committee and developer community – in other words, to keep the open source platform from straying from the requirements of those deploying it.

Interestingly, apart from NASDAQ, enterprises seem relatively under-represented on the committee, which could see future iterations of OpenDaylight focus more heavily on those use cases – possibly over others more common in the enterprise.