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The Paradigm Shift: Software Defined Networks, Software Driven Networks and OpenFlow

By on March 20, 2012 in Service Provider Focus

In a recent blog entry, Harry Quackenboss from Layerz NGN makes some interesting and apropos points regarding the present and evolving world of Software Defined Networks and Software Driven Networks (both use the SDN acronym for now) and OpenFlow. The issue is there are many problems that can be solved with these technologies, and in some cases, the same problems can be solved using more than one technology, which brings to mind the proverbial “you can skin a cat in different ways” situation. Let me spell things out a bit, which hopefully can clarify things by explaining why SDN (and Software Driven Networks) represent a critical paradigm shift in the software application and network technology industries.

First, it might be controversial to say this, but there are really no use cases in this space that I can think of or that have been discussed recently that cannot be solved using existing mechanisms versus Software Driven Networks (SDrN), and in a subset of those cases, Software Defined Networks (SDN). Of course with that in mind, please also remember that given enough thrust just about any pig can be made to fly! What is, however, important about SDrN is HOW it solves (or proposes to solve) these problems and how quickly it can solve them in terms of real operational and application development time.

Take the basic premise of OpenFlow itself: on its surface (at least for now) it amounts to what is really just static routes/forwarding entries. We already know how to manipulate/provision/interact with those constructs in existing devices today using interfaces such as CLI, XMLConf, SNMP, etc.  Why don’t we just use those things and call it a day? Simple. Where things differ is how applications interact with those components today versus how you need to interact with them — especially in a hyper-virtualized environment that not only needs to be brought up quickly, but also needs to change frequently. These environments also contain orders of magnitude more components than a traditional non-virtualized environment. What is important is what network devices and service points provide to the applications and at what rate of speed you can interact with them.

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Cloud’s Impact on MPLS and Other Networks

By on February 21, 2012 in Service Provider Focus

As a follow up to the post from last week, I am including a link to video from the panel/debate from the MPLS Ethernet World Congress 2012 in which I participated. The panel’s topic of discussion was “The Cloud Impact” or more precisely, how has cloud computing impacted MPLS and other networks. The conclusion was pretty unanimous that it has changed the network for the better by forcing network equipment vendors to think about coming closer to the application world.

Conversely, it has made application vendors and authors think more carefully about how they want to interact with network equipment and resources. The conclusion was that Software Driven Networks (SDN) are definitely the future of these technologies, but that refinement and clarity is needed. Stay tuned to this space for more discussion on this going forward.

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MPLS Ethernet World Congress 2012 a Success!

By on February 15, 2012 in Service Provider Focus, Uncategorized

The main theme of the MPLS Ethernet World Congress conference (hosted in Paris, France, Feb. 6-10, 2012) was “The Cloud Impact” and resulted in topics being largely cloud/data center and Software Driven/Defined Network (SDN) focused. The conference was well attended this year with more than 1,200 delegates attending, with about 75% coming from various service providers and enterprises, and the remainder from device and software vendors. The demographics of attendees were widely dispersed again as is always the case: with large numbers of participants from Europe, America and Asia with even some from Africa and South America (Brazil in particular).

On the first day of the conference, tutorials were presented that focused on these topics, with at least 50% focusing on SDN. Day 1 of the conference saw keynotes from Yakov Rekhter from Juniper Networks and one from Sunil Khandekar from Alcatel-Lucent on clouds, data centers, MPLS and SDN. It is clear that the strategic focus of both of these companies lies in these areas. A number of presentations including my own were focused on SDN and how it will impact data centers, MPLS, Ethernet and cloud technologies. My presentation focused on what I see as an inflection point in the networking and software industries where the areas of networks and applications are more closely aligned via SDN. There seems to be not only significant interest in the industry around SDN, but a number of companies actually building it too. The remainder of the day was punctuated by a number of good presentations, with one in particular from François Lecerf, CTO at Ipanema Technologies.

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It’s Happening Again to Service Providers

By on January 26, 2012 in Service Provider Focus

It is happening again to service providers – this time to cable providers. Subscribers are leaving their video services in droves. This has been reported fairly regularly over the past 6 to 9 months with the increase in streaming services. The downward pressures of over-the-top services like Netflix, Amazon and others is resulting in significant subscriber loss for those services. This was reported today in Light Reading here.

This is starting to resemble the loss of PSTN phone services for telcos. Fortunately cable providers have a leg up on that past situation and have invested heavily in Internet access services. In the near term, this may help plug what could turn out to be a giant hole in the dam that is holding back their overall revenues from collapsing. However, in the longer-term, cable needs to figure out a different strategy. Selling cold data access pipes is not a good way to make money – certainly not with the same level of margins that has been afforded to them in the past with cable video services.

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Are You Ready For IPv6?

By on January 17, 2012 in Service Provider Focus

The trial (detailed here) demonstrated that most networks (corporate, transit and enterprise) were ready for IPv6. As a result of the success, those same participants and many more have banded together to launch the permanent usage of IPv6 on the Internet here today.

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Vigilance Around Testing Space and Time Constraints Is Key To Successful XaaS Deployments

By on January 12, 2012 in Service Provider Focus

Not that long ago, some colleagues and I were discussing the future of infrastructure management products in the cloud-based era we were quickly evolving into. The discussion revolved around how cloud-based services – what I am calling XaaS as in “anything as a service” – and how those things would function in a distributed, cloud-based environment.

What struck us as a predominantly failed assumption was that applications in use today in enterprise data centers – effectively local clouds of computing, storage and network – were not the same environment as an externalized version of those things. In particular, there is a certain amount of “space and time” between storage, computing and networking components in a network regardless of its deployment.

In an enterprise environment, specifically a single data center environment, the space and time (i.e. delay, jitter, loss) characteristics of those components is normally quite low. Given this current normal mode of operation, applications are designed to tolerate limited amounts of these things and will complain, malfunction and downright not work when those things are moved outside of the day-to-day limits. Even stretching an enterprise data center across different geographies still results in manageable values of those space/time characteristics because in general, enterprise IT operations has a very tight leash on these characteristics simply because they are either operated and managed by them directly, or they are outsourced/leased from a third party under stringent contractual terms.

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Should a Company Focus on Making Things or on Reorganizing?

By on November 28, 2011 in Service Provider Focus

Various news outlets including Network World are reporting that Cisco has re-organized itself again, now for what is apparently the third time in the last calendar year. The question is whether or not this is really news worthy of taking notice?

This takes me back to an interesting bit of analysis I had done years ago about how much time a company spends reorganizing itself versus actually doing work (or dealing with the aftermath effects of that reorganization). If you consider what happens during a typical reorganization such as the one that just took place at Cisco, it largely means nothing to the average employee other than a lot of time wasted, spent on worrying about the situation, discussing with managers or co-workers both formally and informally, and attending meetings pertaining to the reorganization. In terms of the reality of what actually happens, well most often it might mean a re-shuffle (in or out) of senior management, a light lay-off or both, but by-and-large, but for the most part this is meaningless to the average employee. For the customer however, this can have a significant impact on delivery of products because the time the company spends dealing with the re-organization can and often does, detract from product development velocity.

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The Kettle Calling the Pot Black?

By on September 20, 2011 in Service Provider Focus

It’s interesting that on the one hand, proponents of OpenFlow, or its parent organization The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), will tell you that they want to rationalize and commoditize (that is, make open) the data plane of Ethernet switches to afford users severe flexibility in choosing the switching infrastructure they employ in their networks and data centers. That seems fair enough – even if much to the peril of existing (often expensive) incumbent equipment vendors that are accustomed to business models that require they charge 80%+ margins for their equipment.
In the ONF’s brave new world, an OpenFlow “controller” is a semi-centralized means by which switches are to be managed and coordinated because they no longer contain any control plane software. However, these controllers are themselves constructed from proprietary software and offered as products of various companies, the prime two of which conspicuously are founded by someone very pivotal in the ONF’s management hierarchy.

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It is Easy to Blow the Credibility of a Company

By on September 12, 2011 in Service Provider Focus

It can be easy to blow the credibility of a company and very hard to earn it back. Just ask HP. In a recent Network World article, an IETF colleague of mine, Scott Bradner, very plainly makes the case for how a mismanaged marketing strategy can devastate a company.

The question I want to ask is, “Can a similarly mismanaged strategy around cloud applications result in the same corporate disaster?” Let me make the case for why this can be the same.

Imagine a corporation that decides, purely based on cost structure, they need to outsource their applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud. Seems fair enough, many are taking this strategy today. The company outsources anywhere from part to 100% of their applications to an external service provider. Next, the company reduces its IT staff down to the bare minimum. Great. Things seem to be going fine. Right up until they do not. Worse yet customers – both internal corporate employees and customers of the services the company provides – are now moved to a virtualized and distant infrastructure no longer under the control of corporate IT. What happens when the quality of the services offered suddenly degrades? What if the company doesn’t reveal to its customers that it has outsourced services to the cloud?

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It’s Steve’s Way or The Highway

By on August 29, 2011 in Service Provider Focus, Uncategorized

This post is a little off the topic of Service Assurance/Infrastructure Management, but I felt that it was apropos in light of last week’s announcement that Steve Jobs was resigning from Apple.

Jobs’ Biggest Contribution: The iPhone

As you might know, Steve otherwise known as “The Jobs” has resigned from Apple. Why is this important? First, this signals a potential shift in Apple’s product design strategy, its “go-to-market” strategy and all other aspects of the company. The reasoning around this is simple: When Jobs was CEO; he was in charge of EVERYTHING. If you disagreed with his direction, well, then you were shown the door.

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Network Management is the Dark Matter of the Network and Computing Universe

By on August 17, 2011 in Service Provider Focus

A recent Network World article points out yet another example of why cloud-based applications and services are not a simple walk in the park to deploy – or support. Let’s take the perspective of the service provider for a moment. Think about all of the moving parts they need to deploy, coordinate and manage over time: fiber links, routers, switches, gateways, computing clusters and more. Then there is the OSS (operational support system) that stitches and manages all of that stuff. That last part is the key here: OSS (and network management in general) is the “dark matter” of the network and computing universe. Why? Simple. It’s what does all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, so no one notices it – until it stops doing its job.

Take the example of cloud-based services and the Amazon EC2 disaster of the week. If you peer into the details of what went wrong, it seems that it was an issue of their internal OSS having bugs and/or missing some key events and not taking action. Those are all network management (and OSS) issues. They really are orthogonal to the equipment that is deployed in that sea of routers, switches and virtual machines that underpin their services.

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Cisco Layoff Rumors Confirmed

By on July 19, 2011 in Service Provider Focus

Cisco this week confirmed it will be reducing headcount via layoffs in an effort to maximize growth potential. The network giant updated its “action plan” Monday detailing both plans to reduce its global workforce by 6,500 as well as selling a 5,000-person manufacturing facility in Mexico to Foxconn.

The information from the company confirms rumors that have been circulating around its plans to cut staff and somehow return to profitability. The layoffs, which Cisco says will include 2,100 employees that volunteered to retire early, will help the company “right-size” the organization and realign its workforce. The planned cuts will represent 9% of Cisco’s regular full-time workforce (estimated at about 73,000 total), the company says. And 15% of the cuts are coming out of the employees at or above the level of vice president, Cisco says.

Cisco also shared its plans to sell a facility in Mexico as part of efforts to “simplify business operations” yet the company stated the action is not an indication of any change to its approach to the service provider market.

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