The importance of SDN to the enterprise - TechTalk 43
Transcript
hi this is Keith Townson from virtualized Geek and you're watching episode number 42 of virtualized Geeks Tech talk you know what this is a meaty topic software defined networking you know we talked about software defined storage last week which is you know what that's a that's a tough topic but software defin networking there's a lot at stake from a lot of the Legacy vendors out there whether they're Hardware vendors or uh players such as VM where with their acquisition of Nera and trying to get a
foothold into networking there's a lot at stake and a lot of kind of conversation and food going around about what software toine networking what's needed you know do we really need this whole concept of network virtualization to have a programmable Network this policy driven so I figured I'd tackle this from a business perspective right like kind of the why why we do it and then back our way into the technology and why we choose certain technology constructs versus others so let's talk about the business challenge
that software defined networking or the programmable or abstracted network whatever we want to call it what's the real business challenge not the technology challenge but the business challenge this how we s this is how we actually sell these techn techologies into our Enterprise whether we're a network administrator trying to convince our network manager or a director or CIO to accept these Technologies or if we're a CIO trying to sell it to a CEO basically what does the whole concept of a programmable Network gives the business
so the business problem it's the same problem that we have when we're balance Shadow it uh with amazon.com or Rackspace or openstack or whatever the cloud provider when a business provider gets frustrated with it and its ability to execute upon strategy then they'll go to wherever they can to con to be able to consume the services that they need in order to support their mission software defined networking aims to solve a spefic specific problem around the network one of the bottlenecks when it comes to cloud
computing in general is the network when we think about kind of the time that it takes to provision x86 compute the time that it takes to even provision storage compared to the time that it takes to provision networking there is no comparison even you know we like to beat up on storage and the complexity of storage but bottom line is once storage is set up and provision and given to your Venter we probably going have to talk to the storage administrators until we run out of
storage networking is very unique in the sense that every time you set up a new application new firewall rules have to be set up uh new vlans uh networks routing tables the whole shebang if I need to test applications I have to do the same thing if I need to set up disaster recovery I have to uh create a new design for Disaster Recovery if I want to extend my network out to the cloud I have to figure out how to do that securely so from
a kind of process perspective Network becomes the bottleneck of the cloud I recently did kind of a lot of research on open stack which is you know it's kind of the thing everyone talks about open stack for agility but when you look at kind of the three building BL block box of openstack uh Nova sender sender and neutron which is the networking piece I looked a lot into n Neutron and I'm thinking wow where's where's the meat I'm not talking about kind of the meat of
Technology the technology is pretty much there for virtualizing the network I'm talking about where is the orchestration and problem solving of my current solution which is managing my physical devices and creating this this Nirvana of software Define networking open stack by itself doesn't solve that Neutron by itself doesn't solve that uh prod product projects such as vmware's NXX uh open daylight uh Cisco's ACI is aiming at solving these problems it it it it brings about vmware's theme from VM World 2013 when they're trying to explain
the business value of NXX the new fast is better or fast is faster is better basically the faster you can provision the more integrated the solution is into your operations the better the overall value to the organization so let's forget about the ability that NXX hypervisor brings let's talk about the value that INX ACI brings to the Enterprise when it comes to uh agility I've often made the argument that cloud computing is most definitely not about saving money deploying software defined networking is not about saving
money it's about adding capability if we can make an argument to our business owners that we can not only be as quick and responding to their needs and as an elas ftic as responding to their needs as AWS but we can also add much more capability and value to those Services then we can fight Shadow it the ideal that we can integrate with the existing CRM Erp uh that we can integrate with our collaboration tools and to enable the business to build new and cool applications
that really meet the needs of the business is an argument that software Define networking overall supports so you know there's two flavors basically of from the two major vendors VMware and Cisco of software defined networking vmware's approach is to virtualize everything they're are virtualization companies so if you virtualize everything abstracted from the hardware you can put a software wrapper around that indexx and feed that up to the application layer the application layer can take it from there and now voila you have uh software defined networking
you have this capability that I just spoke about Cisco slightly different approach they say you know what we if we give you a controller and allow you to control your Hardware provision your Hardware do the VLAN configurations the firewall the virtual firewalls if we can give you that uh um feature set and allow you to still have the same level of performance that you're accustomed to from uh Asic based silicone then hey why why not the better there's pros and cons to each approach VMware Hardware
agnostic if you have a juniper network if you had a heterog heterogenous Network in general and you want to leverage software defined networking and your majority the majority of your network network is virtualized then there's a play for you when it comes to uh VMware solution Cisco on on the other hand is if you have a non VMware environment let's play let's be honest if you if you're a big hyperv shop and you want all of the advantages of a software defined Network then VMware uh
can't really play in that space at least not today with hyperv and Cisco can come along and give you that capability Cisco also has the advantage that they have a huge foot footprint not only in the Enterprise but also in a service provider so when you're talking about extending your software defined network from the Enterprise to the uh cl to the provider Cloud Cisco may have a better story to tell today than uh VMware does but back to the main point software to find networking why
do we care about it the whole point is to be able to enable the business to have the agility that cloud computing promises we need to be able to abstract the uh control plane of the network in some fashion so that we can give tool such as opack VMware VC uh bmc's Cloud manager the list goes on and on when we give those applications the ability to control the network we offer we offer the business True Value well that's it for this episode of virtualized Geeks
Tech talk we'll talk a little bit more about Network virtualization versus uh kind of the whole ACI approach or Hardware based programmable networks we'll talk about that I think pretty soon in the near future visit us on virtualized geek.com like the videos comment talk to you guys next tech tech talk
