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The last several years have seen a fast-paced progression of so-called new paradigms in networking technology and frameworks for delivering applications and services. While these changes are designed to make things better, faster and more efficient, there are inherent functional challenges; not least the increasing network demand on complex and inflexible legacy models. This has led to a drive to find new ways to transition to a simplified, automated, and software-centric method for arranging and scaling networks.

Looking at advances over the past 15 years in the core application delivery technologies of compute, storage and networking, it is clear that networking has lagged behind. While storage and compute have moved to a virtualised model and orchestrated service delivery, networking has essentially been static with infrastructure still being managed, often with centralised tools, on a box-by-box basis.

In the data centre, network infrastructure tends to get over-provisioned, and will only encounter minor configuration changes throughout its lifetime. Human latency and possibilities of configuration errors make change a painful and risky prospect. In contrast, compute and storage are much more dynamic with the agility to respond to changing business requirements, through a combination of orchestration and virtualisation which removes human latency and risk.

Orchestration is more than just configuration management and monitoring. An orchestrated environment can apply constantly changing business requirements on the underlying application delivery fabric. Compute and storage have matured significantly and now offer orchestration and virtualisation toolsets to support the business dynamics.

Networking, however, has some way to go. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is one initiative to virtualise the underlying network infrastructure and allow dynamic adjustment of traffic paths in response to changing requirements. Another initiative to deliver more flexible networking is Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), which allows network functions such as firewalling and load balancing to be dynamically deployed and linked together. SDN and NFV offer network building blocks in the same way as a hypervisor provides one of the building blocks for server virtualisation. The orchestration of these underlying enablers is vital to bringing networking to the same level of agility as compute and storage.

Enabling network agility with technologies such as SDN and NFV offers significant benefits as network orchestration tools can adjust the network to match changing business needs. At a most basic level orchestration provides the automation that makes network changes both safe and quick to implement. This is essential for organisations such as service providers that need a network that is programmable, but can also be automated, allowing subscribers to self-serve and supports pay-as-you-go consumption models where services may be short lived, and de-provisioned after use. The orchestration of business-as-usual events is only part of the opportunity afforded by a dynamic network as it can also be orchestrated to react in real time. The triggers and subsequent actions may be implemented in the orchestration toolset or directed via API, using an external service.

An example of external service interaction could be where there is a sudden spike in traffic between two servers. This could be due to a hypervisor host move, for example, that impacts on other traffic by congesting intermediate switches. An external service could detect the switch congestion from the SDN controller but also the increase in application latency on servers on the congested switch. An automated reprogramming of the switches using SDN, by the orchestrator, could quickly direct traffic around the impacted switch.

An orchestrated infrastructure not only enables automation of routine functions, but also dynamically adjusts to ever-changing business requirements. Including networking as an orchestrated component enhances application and service delivery capabilities through greater agility and an optimised use of networking assets. NC