| Software defined networking (SDN) is the new buzzword in the networking and data centre industry. But what are the technology and business benefits it can deliver and should your data centre manager be looking at this technology now? Jean Turgeon, head of networking and chief technologist at Avaya outlines what CIOs should know about the impact of this technology on the data centre, before their data centre manager comes knocking on their door.
Leaps in the use of social media coupled with the omnipresence of mobile technology mean that we are all consuming more and more bandwidth, using numerous applications and storing ever increasing amounts of data on our devices and in the cloud. Today’s employees work from a host of different locations, on a range of different devices, creating an always accessible culture that - as all CIOs and IT Directors are (often painfully) aware - puts the data centre at the heart of most organisations’ IT operations. Consequently, businesses need to ensure that their data centres are robust, yet able to support new services, quickly. This is where Software Defined Networking (SDN) comes in.
The basics
The main goal of SDN is to reduce the complexity, eliminate propriety solutions, allow the fast deployment of business critical applications and establish quick and easy adds, moves and changes. SDN works in the network infrastructure to separate the part of the network responsible for routing traffic from the part that actually carries the traffic. This means the data that is being carried is separate to the control traffic, ensuring that the infrastructure is more dynamic. As such it should give data centre managers far greater control and simplify technology management. SDN should respond to changing business speeds, while also providing the efficiencies and the security requirements that a modern enterprise needs. So far so technical, but what does this actually mean from a business perspective?
Automation
Automation-related time, cost and accuracy efficiencies are by far the biggest benefits that SDN is predicted to deliver to the data centre. The applications running on any data centre server are subject to access or policy controls. Typically, every router and switch on a network has software pre-installed that controls what it does. For example, the CEO might have access to everything, but the receptionist may only have access to documents that do not contain any financial information. In a traditional data centre, each element of these policies needs to be manually configured on each router and switch.
SDN automation is likely to allow data centre managers to deploy a ‘configure once, roll-out across all locations approach’ with changes made via a centralised management console - saving time and costs and improving accuracy. However the real benefit should come with the deployment of new applications. The configuration is applied to the network and not just the interfaces, so any changes are also applied at the network level. SDN promises to provide the CIO with the capability to deploy applications much more quickly than conventional mechanisms, whilst retaining total control.
Cloud-ready
Cloud adoption, by businesses of all sizes, shows no signs of abating. SDN could offer considerable benefits to data centres supporting public cloud apps by using in-built intelligence in the routing layer of the data centre to choose the optimal configuration. Typically, data centres hosting applications within a public cloud environment have to manually provision the required resources, often resulting in configuration errors and delays. SDN should eliminate this provisioning, reducing cost, saving time and improving the accuracy of network changes.
The need for speed
Business in the 21st century moves at a much faster pace than ever before. Reflecting this, the data centre also needs to be more nimble and able to provide services more quickly. SDN has the potential to play a key role in delivering this speed, thanks to the automation it provides based upon a centralised view and not a list of interfaces: changes can be made in near real-time across the network as a whole. Services can be automatically provisioned and if issues do occur, SDN technology should intelligently and instantly re-route the services much more quickly than an engineer could.
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