EDITOR’S NOTE WHERE DO SDN PRODUCTS FIT IN?

USING SOFTWARE- DEFINED APPLICATIONS

MICROSOFT JOINING THE SDN PARTY

Picking the Right Spots for SDNBusinesses with a traditional data center may think software-defined networking a bad fit. Certain SDN products, though, can augment an incumbent network to boost efficiency.

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Making SDN Work for You

It’s easy for an IT admin to be stubborn when it comes to embracing a technology like software-defined networking. Perhaps it seems like installing SDN would be disruptive and not worth the time, effort and money, or maybe the benefits to your network seem minimal.

In this guide, data center and networking expert Keith Townsend writes about some of the misconceptions that plague the technology and offers up a look at examples of SDN that improve service but don’t add hassles. First, he examines two SDN technologies: software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and network function virtualization (NFV). SD-WAN products bring together the power of big data analytics and traditional networking, and are helpful in mak-ing real-time decisions on traffic management. With NFV, Townsend notes the benefits of vir-tualization, including eliminating technician visits and decreasing the time needed to provi-sion new services.

Next, TechTarget’s Stephen J. Bigelow writes that software-defined applications—which work in a software-defined networking envi-ronment—can help businesses take advantage of horizontal scaling. Bigelow reminds users that a software-defined app cannot operate without control over the data center or cloud-based infrastructure.

Microsoft will be entering the SDN enter-prise market in the third quarter of 2016, TechTarget’s Antone Gonsalves writes. With the company’s Azure Stack product, released in conjunction with Windows Server 2016, Microsoft is aiming to become a player in SDN, although analysts tell Gonsalves it may take time for the company to hit its stride. n

Dan CagenAssociate Features Editor

Data Center and Virtualization Media GroupTechTarget

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Where Do SDN Products Fit In?

If you look around your data center and see a traditional core, aggregation and access layer design, it might seem that software-defined networking wouldn’t fit. There’s also a notion that SDN is driven by new initia-tives, such as private cloud. These are common misconceptions.

SDN is a broad term that encompasses a wide selection of technologies. Two use cases for SDN that should interest many network man-agers are software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and network function virtualization (NFV).

SD-WAN BRINGS OPTIONS

SD-WAN improves service while reducing costs. Dynamically sending network traffic over the appropriate link has vexed network engi-neers for years. The first thought is to com-pare SD-WAN to policy-based routing (PBR). In PBR, engineers take an artisanal approach

to traffic management; it’s not uncommon for organizations to abandon the effort out of frustration.

SD-WAN products combine the power of big data analytics and traditional networking. They monitor traffic flows and network latency and jitter making real-time decisions on traf-fic management. A common comparison to SD-WAN is voice traffic management. A PBR approach may dictate leveraging a Multiproto-col Label Switching (MPLS) connection for all voice traffic and a lower-quality Internet VPN for non-latency sensitive traffic. This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule; if an MPLS connection is congested on the far side, the Internet VPN is the more viable option.

Trying to create a routing policy for this type of dynamic traffic routing wasn’t feasible—at least not until SD-WAN vendors combined the power of general compute with inexpensive network links. Using real-time traffic analysis,

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middleboxes direct traffic over the best avail-able link.

The list of SD-WAN vendors is long. The Packet Pushers track a list of about 20 ven-dors in this market. Some vendors provide the traffic analysis and flow control rules as part of a software as a service (SaaS) offering. SaaS offerings are quick to deploy, as there’s no need to rely on customer-side server infrastructure for analysis. Other options offer some sort of central controller that maintains link state and the routing tree. Almost every SD-WAN pro-vider advertises simple deployment, with tra-ditional interior routing protocols replaced by proprietary algorithms calculated in a control-ler node.

DEPLOYING NFV

Network function virtualization (NFV) is another area that network managers should investigate. By virtualizing edge devices, car-riers reduce the overall cost of managing infrastructure and provide better service to customers. The savings come from deploying new middleboxes to edge locations.

Without using NFV, provisioning new cus-tomers may require configuring and deploy-ing new equipment to edge devices. It can be expensive to deploy new equipment; the equip-ment itself and a technician’s installation visit both add expenses. NFV eliminates the tech-nician’s visit while decreasing provisioning time for new services. To start a new service or increase capacity, a carrier spins up a new VM running a particular NFV instance.

Similar advantages exist for business cus-tomers as well. Configuring non-switching devices is time-consuming for network man-agers. From load balancers to firewalls, a lot of time is spent deploying and managing hardware that could benefit from abstraction.

Using firewalls as an example, it’s common to go into an environment and see a design with two VMs residing on the same physical host communicating via an external firewall. It’s just as common to see that the license of port on the physical firewall is 100Mbps. There’s no technical reason for maintaining a physical firewall—a virtualized firewall is just as secure, more efficient and easier to maintain.

Assuming licensing is the same, network

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performance would improve as you flatten the network without making changes to the physi-cal route and switching underlay. In addition, customers realize all the advantages of virtu-alization. Prior to an upgrade, an engineer can clone the firewall, place it in an isolated virtual network and test new configurations. During the change window, a snapshot of the NFV-based firewall is taken. If the upgrade fails, recovery is as simple as reverting the snapshot. Recreating this capability in a physical network is daunting and expensive.

A common question is the segregation of security controls between the server group and

the network organization. Modern virtualiza-tion platforms allow for segregated control of VMs between groups. For example, VMware vSphere allows organizations to create vCenter security groups that allow only the network group to delete, rename or edit NFV devices. The controls are granular.

Don’t let the label of SDN prevent you from adopting technologies that both reduce cost and make managing your network easier. Both SD-WAN and NFV are examples of tech-nologies that aren’t particularly difficult to implement or disruptive to current operating models. —Keith Townsend

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Using Software-Defined Applications

Software-defined applications are designed to perform a task in a software-defined networking environment. SDN apps and infrastructure promise data centers more flexibility, efficiency and resiliency than virtu-alization and monolithic app designs.

Moving beyond virtualization, which includes a largely manual provisioning pro-cess that can be time-consuming and rife with errors, containers offer a more modular approach to application development. Devel-opers assemble a software-defined application from a series of independent modules, or com-ponents, called microservices. Each microser-vice runs in a container and communicates via APIs. Those APIs make microservices work, giving containerized components a route to pass data and commands between the func-tional modules that create the working applica-tion. IT teams automate deployment, monitor performance and scale components by spinning

up additional containers and load-balancing API traffic between apps. Unused contain-ers can be shut down, which saves computing resources.

While there are benefits, a software-defined application cannot function without some degree of control over the data center or cloud-based infrastructure.

THE RESOURCES BEHIND THE APPS

Infrastructure monitoring and automation software define and manage VMs, contain-ers, storage instances, network segments and other elements needed to deploy and scale application components in line with estab-lished benchmarks and policies. For example, if an application’s queuing system performance drops below acceptable speeds, the software-defined infrastructure automatically spins up additional, temporary queuing components on

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any available server. While any app may grow or shrink over time, this level of self-service, orchestrated scaling is important for erratic or unpredictable workloads.

In this way, APIs aren’t just a staple of software-defined applications; they also form a foundation for software-defined infrastruc-tures. Without API behaviors to determine when additional performance is needed and then initiate action to remediate the situa-tion, IT professionals would need to constantly monitor and adjust resources assigned to an application.

Software-defined applications and infra-structure increasingly embrace the notion of horizontal versus vertical scaling. Traditional applications rely on vertical scaling, which increases resources allocated to a principal software instance. Horizontal scaling, on the other hand, duplicates application component instances—usually built as microservices—as demand for that functionality increases.

Horizontal scaling is the more attractive ap-proach because it better enables monitoring and automation. For example, when monitoring reveals that a component’s time-to-service API

calls are too low, a software-defined infrastruc-ture automatically duplicates one or more com-ponents—and load-balances API traffic—so those additional components work together to handle the increased application work.

Conversely, if monitoring reveals that API calls are easily handled with resources to spare, the software-defined infrastructure can auto-matically remove, or scale down, additional components to release the resources for other jobs.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SOFTWARE-

DEFINED ARCHITECTURE

The term “software defined” is attached to a slew of technologies: storage, networks, appli-cations, power, infrastructures and even entire data centers. The concept of using software to provision and optimize elements of the IT environment is exciting, but adding the soft-ware-defined tag to anything creates confusion and can be misleading for IT teams navigating the realms of software-defined applications and infrastructure.

Take software-defined architecture (SDA),

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for example. The term, which Gartner coined to mean an extension of software-defined networking and software-oriented architec-ture, is easily confused with software-defined infrastructure. However, software-defined architecture attempts to encapsulate the data center’s internal hardware and services and insulate those resources from the applications, services and devices that might be exposed to users—effectively segregating the producers or providers from the consumers. Creating this boundary hides or abstracts the inner work-ings of the business (the servers, storage arrays and networking schema) and allows IT teams to change, update or replace them without affect-ing end-user-facing applications, services or devices.

To create such a logical boundary, typically called a software gateway, between data center resources and outside users, SDA relies on two

sets of APIs. The inner APIs organize and drive the internal systems, optimized for data cen-ter-side performance. Outer APIs, which are optimized for long-distance network operation, can securely access internal APIs.

A software gateway is built from a combina-tion of software components, including inte-gration brokers, API managers, API gateways and a SOA interface. When properly imple-mented, the software gateway can translate APIs and handle security, orchestration and routing.

This approach abstracts applications, ser-vices and devices from the underlying data center that provides them. This abstraction helps to protect the data center and its data. When combined with APIs, the abstraction also decouples end users from providers, mean-ing changes to one will not affect the other.

—Stephen J. Bigelow

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Microsoft Joining the SDN Party

Microsoft’s Azure Stack, in combina-tion with Windows Server 2016, stands to make the software company a major player in the SDN enterprise market, alongside Cisco and VMware.

In February 2016, Microsoft introduced a technical preview of the Azure Stack, which is expected to ship along with Windows Server 2016. The SDN stack has the technology nec-essary to make Microsoft a strong competitor in the SDN enterprise market, particularly as a provider of interoperability between a user’s private cloud and Microsoft’s public cloud, Azure.

“I do expect Microsoft to become a major SDN player,” said John E. Burke, an analyst at Nemertes Research. “As with [Microsoft’s] Hyper-V and Azure, it will take a little time for the momentum to build and enterprise comfort levels to rise.”

Microsoft built several components into the

Azure Stack that are expected to make SDN attractive to its business customers. The tech-nologies Microsoft plans to provide include a network controller, load balancing and sup-port for Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN), an encapsulation protocol for running an overlay over a traditional hardware-based Layer 2 and Layer 3 network, said Mark Scholman, an Azure consultant at Inovativ, a Microsoft technology specialist.

A VXLAN takes control of the network out of the hardware and places it instead in software running on a server. In Microsoft’s case, it’s the Azure Stack running on Windows Server 2016 or Linux.

The technologies in Azure Stack are a “big game changer,” Scholman said. That’s because they provide a consistent application develop-ment and deployment platform between Azure and a private cloud built with Azure Stack in the data center.

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MICROSOFT’S SDN STACK

At a high level, Microsoft’s SDN stack starts with the Azure Resource Manager, a frame-work that lets administrators deploy, manage, and monitor Azure and private cloud resources built with Microsoft technology, Scholman said. Underneath is a network resource pro-vider that talks to the controller, which pro-vides applications with network services, such as load balancing or a virtual private network.

Developers would be able to build appli-cations for Azure or the Azure Stack using Microsoft’s Visual Studio suite and the Azure

software development kit.Microsoft is betting that many organizations

will want to use an SDN stack for running some workloads in Azure and others in-house. For example, the customer-facing front end of an application could run in Azure, while the collected data is processed and stored in a com-pany’s data center.

Such a scenario might be necessary to com-ply with a country’s privacy laws. Also, split-ting workloads between a private and public cloud can reduce a company’s IT expenses.

—Antone Gonsalves

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ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

KEITH TOWNSEND, the principal of The CTO Advisor and founder of TheCTOAdvisor.com, has more than 15 years of related experience designing, implementing and man-aging data center technologies. His areas of expertise in-clude virtualization, networking and storage systems for Fortune 500 organizations.

STEPHEN J. BIGELOW, the senior technology editor in the Data Center and Virtualization Media Group at Tech-Target, has more than 20 years of technical writing expe-rience in the PC/technology industry.

ANTONE GONSALVES is news director for the Networking Media Group at TechTarget.

Picking the Right Spots for SDN is a SearchDataCenter.com publication.

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Dan Cagen | Associate Features Editor

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© 2016 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or repro-duced in any form or by any means without written permission from the pub-lisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group.

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