Today, we have an extensive choice of personal technology available to us. There are applications to enhance every facet of our lives, from booking holidays to managing our finances, dating, and even catching a cab. It is also possible to top up our data limit within a few swipes and access the internet from pretty much anywhere. CIOs are keen to emulate this on-demand, flexible environment in their own organisations, but many find it very hard to do so.
The typical enterprise network now comprises of hundreds or even thousands of network devices and functions, which are designed to be resilient and reliable, but they are also inflexible. The resulting problem is that most networks cannot continue to scale and meet the changing needs of businesses that depend increasingly on digital technologies, says Len Padilla, VP Product Services, NTT Communications.
Many C-suite executives are now also pushing digital transformation to underpin a wider range of business strategies. So as well as dealing with ‘conventional’ infrastructure problems such as outages and poor performance, ICT departments are also required to deliver new generations of business apps in order to support the new directions their organisation is heading in. Understandably, the ICT department is feeling the pressure. What’s more, the usual constraints persist. Resources are tight, costs are high, and negotiating between different teams can be difficult. This is the chaos that is holding back enterprise ICT.
The shift from hardware-centric to software-centric ICT holds many of the solutions. There are several technologies in play, but for my money, the most noteworthy ones are SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualisation). While SDN and NFV may just sound like the latest tech acronyms, together they hold the key to overcoming the complex challenges felt by ICT departments. Indeed, Gartner’s recent predictions of a ‘mesh app and service architecture’, which runs in a completely virtualised cloud environment, could only be realised through these technologies.
NFV is akin to the server virtualisation many readers will be familiar with. It removes the operating systems of proprietary hardware like a router, firewall, WAN accelerator or web server, and shifts the intelligence to an array of standardised servers within a cloud. Think of it as a ‘network-as-a-service’ – enabling ICT departments to configure networks as a whole, rather than setting up each device individually. Each of these servers can also be virtualised, so service providers can add more processing power and virtual ports when needed. This also means that software controlling the data flows is always up-to-date and configurable in a simple web portal.
SDN breaks a network down to its constituent parts: the network control is decoupled from packet forwarding. Think of SDN as the ‘brains’. In a traditional network device, the control layer needs to be constantly updated when there is a change to network paths so that it can direct packets onward. In a SDN, a centralised controller has a complete view of the entire network and knowledge of all network paths with device capabilities sitting in a single, remote application. In other words, all of the network devices can be programmed remotely in a simple administrator’s portal. The network device is then ‘dumbed down’ to forward or inspect or block as instructed by the centralised controller.
In my next blog I’ll explain how together SDN and NFV are shaking up the enterprise network and the benefits they deliver to CIOs.
The author of this blog is Len Padilla, VP Product Services, NTT Communications.
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