© 2014 NTTT Group and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is NTT Group Public Information.

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POINT OF VIEW

NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE ELASTICITY

Masahisa Kawashima, VP Product Management

ABSTRACT In today’s business world, technology is quickly becoming one of the most important factors in a company’s chance of success, or remaining a market leader for any length of time. Businesses are in a race to be the fastest to market, the fastest to ship, and the most nimble purveyors of public whims and taste. Technology is the engine that is driving this race, and at this pace, every business risks running itself into a

technological wall.

Companies often see market shifts coming, but find it impossible to respond fast enough because the IT infrastructure won’t allow a quick response. Meanwhile, IT engineers find their hands tied by their workloads. They often don’t have the time to develop or deploy new services or business processes that meet the increasing demands of the business. To make matters worse, there simply aren’t enough qualified

IT employees who have the required skills to work with new, complex networking and data center equipment and software.

Businesses can solve part of this problem by embracing a cloud-computing platform that provides automated services, and an abstracted view of operations that hides the complexities of hardware and software configuration. While many organizations are making use of cloud computing products, these solutions leave a gap at the edge of the

network. Many devices at the network’s edge, such as security appliances and application delivery controllers (ADC), are not yet integrated with cloud computing products, and therefore, must be operated with intensive manual processes and complex configuration rules.

NTTi3 is currently developing an Elastic Service Infrastructure Platform (ESIP) to

improve business infrastructure operation. By extending the automation and

abstraction technologies of cloud computing to the operation of networking devices, it will be possible for IT operators to manage multiple data centers in disparate locations remotely and quickly, with reduced workload and staff.

© 2014 NTTT Group and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is NTT Group Public Information. 2

INTRODUCTION

Today’s business environment dictates that every industry, and every company,

regardless of what they manufacture or sell, is a technology company. Business

success depends not only on the quality of the company’s product but on the quality of

the differentiated services and experiences the company delivers. The more

technology-enabled services and experiences become prevalent, the more companies

and consumers expect. As a result, companies demand an iterative fail-and-learn

application development process at a break-neck pace.

THREE CHALLENGES TO EFFICIENT ENTERPRISE IT

It is becoming increasingly apparent that in order to support application development

with fail-and-learn processes for technology-enabled services, IT managers must

address three critical challenges:

Speed gap between servers and network devices

While virtual servers can be instantly deployed on demand with sophisticated software,

network devices must be configured at human speed with complex and manual

procedures. In addition, as many networking devices are shared by multiple

application systems, re-configuring a network device for a new application requires

meticulous work to avoid interference with existing applications. This expands the gap

in the speed of operation between servers and network devices.

Proliferation of network devices

Secondly, the evolution of new technologies brings new requirements on IT

infrastructure. For example, the evolution of high-speed mobile networks and the

prevalence of smartphones have brought new demands such as device-based content

optimization and policy enforcement. As the IT industry is aggressively inventing new

network devices to address the demand, IT workers are required to continuously learn

new skills and protocols. However, technology is changing so rapidly that devices often

become obsolete before being fully mastered and leveraged.

Spiraling infrastructure operation costs

According to a technical publication from University of California at Berkeley, even

small networks require a team of up to 25 people, which is a costly proposition. Many

network-purchasing decisions are now based on whether the IT staff has enough

expertise to use it.1 To bridge the gap, IT departments have traditionally hired more

people, but this inflates the cost of IT operation. This approach is no longer sustainable,

1 Justine Sherry and Sylvia Ratnasamy: A Survey of Enterprise Middlebox Deployments February 9, 2012

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-24.html

© 2014 NTTT Group and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is NTT Group Public Information. 3

as companies shift their spending from infrastructure operation to application

development to be competitive in the IT-enabled services race.

THREE TRENDS MAKING THE CHALLENGES EVEN HARDER

Worse, the following three trends are making infrastructure more complex and the

challenges even harder:

Infrastructure is becoming more distributed

Before cloud technology was available, business networks were primarily concerned

with internal traffic between offices and data centers. Today, business must consider

using pubic services, such as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, to complement their private

infrastructure. In addition, a mobile and outsourced workforce must be accommodated.

This requires IT operators to mange many locations, including public sites and

distributed small workplaces.

Workloads are becoming more volatile and unpredictable

IT-enabled services often involve running consumer-facing websites and supporting

business and consumer mobile devices. Traffic from consumers is naturally more

volatile than intra-corporate traffic, and unpredictable in some cases. Maintaining IT

infrastructure to meet performance expectations is becoming more difficult, creating

additional burden on operators.

Security threats are increasing

Today, cyber attacks are fueled by economic incentives. Attackers can easily monetize

stolen data and hijacked infrastructure. Highly motivated attackers are continuously

developing new attack techniques leveraging the latest technologies. As the result,

security risks are increasing rapidly.

Under these circumstances, it is impossible for IT to meet speed and cost expectations.

Yet, businesses are requiring agile and lean IT operations that support the application

development of their IT-enabled services. Without solving this critical issue, companies

will not survive. This leads to the conclusion that the traditional IT model is simply

inadequate for the challenge at hand, and it is time for a dramatic change.

© 2014 NTTT Group and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is NTT Group Public Information. 4

A NEW MODEL TO KEEP IT NIMBLE—AND MORE VALUABLE

Ideally, new technologies should enable IT operators to configure infrastructure faster,

and more cost effectively, thus shifting IT engineers from infrastructure operation to

application development.

To achieve this, today’s infrastructure that is rooted in the physical and manually

intensive world must transition to a new infrastructure model that is powered by

software automation.

ELASTIC SERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE PLATFORM

NTT i3 is developing an Elastic Service Infrastructure Platform (ESIP) that will allow IT

operators to deliver infrastructure resources for applications faster with reduced

workload. We rely on three fundamental concepts to build ESIP:

Transform physical network devices into virtual instances

The scale of the X86 economy has dramatically reduced the cost of the X86-based

high-speed computing platform. This has created an opportunity for networking device

manufacturers to create virtualized, e.g. software, versions of their products, which run

on X86-based generic computing platforms. This trend, Network Function Virtualization

(NFV), will reduce the configuration and management speed gap between servers and

network devices. Unlike traditional physical devices, virtualized networking functions

can be deployed and configured at software speed. The nature of software will enable

the deployment of per-application granular instances instead of deploying one big multi-

tenant instance. This will alleviate today’s complexity stemming from multi-tenancy

configuration. Another benefit of virtualization is the ability to deploy multiple, granular

instances in distributed locations, instead of deploying a single device in a datacenter.

This will allow performance and security functions to be performed at distributed

locations instead of inefficiently aggregating traffic to the data center.

Create a single location to manage distributed infrastructure

Cloud computing has brought a sophisticated paradigm of IT infrastructure

management, where IT operators manage different types of IT resources coherently

with a software tool called an orchestrator. ESIP leverages orchestration technologies

that will enable IT operators to collectively operate IT resources, including computing

and network, distributed in multiple locations from a single point. This will decrease the

workload in managing a multitude of network resources in today’s distributed

infrastructure.

© 2014 NTTT Group and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is NTT Group Public Information. 5

Use APIs to make operations programmable

Another benefit of orchestrator-based infrastructure management is that it makes

infrastructure operations programmable. With the use of an orchestrator API, new tools

can continuously be developed to assist IT operators. Tools may hide the complexities

of underlying IT resources and automate configuration procedures with simplified

menus, enabling novice IT operators to quickly respond to infrastructure demands.

Other tools may collect metrics from distributed infrastructure elements and visualize

performance bottlenecks and security anomalies, enabling IT operators to take

appropriate actions responsively. As a result, business will be able to significantly

reduce IT workload, using simplified and automated commands.

CONCLUSION

The NTTi3 Elastic Service Infrastructure Platform will transform the way businesses

operate their IT infrastructure. In addition to improvements in resource management, IT

operations will at last function more fully at computer-speed, rather than at human

speed. With the advent of intelligent orchestrators managing software-based network

and data center elements on a large scale, IT engineers, and the companies that

employ them, will find their true value as creators of a new business world—one that

works faster, more efficiently, more cost effectively, and more competitively than ever

before. Best of all, applying automation to routine network processes brings IT staff

back to the roots of discovery and invention—all to the good of the business and the

customers it serves.

© 2014 NTTT Group and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is NTT Group Public Information. 6

WHO WE ARE

NTT Innovation Institute, Inc., (NTTi3) is the Silicon Valley-based open innovation and

applied research and development center of NTT Group (which includes NTT Data,

Dimension Data, NTT Communications, and Docomo). The NTT Group invests more

than $2.5 billion a year in R&D to develop market-driven, customer-focused solutions

and services. NTTi3 and its world-class scientists and engineers partner with prominent

technology companies and start-ups to deliver market-leading solutions that span

strategy, business applications, data, and infrastructure.

More information is available at www.ntti3.com