Promotion | tECHnoLoGY

SDN Gets the Network Out of the WaySoftware Defined Networking removes the last barrier to business agility. The increase in efficiency and cost-effectiveness can be extraordinary.

Business agility is more than just a buzzword. Success means delivering services and adjusting to changing market condi-

tions faster than your competition, as well as realizing cost efficiencies that you can pass on to your customers.

Enterprises of all sizes are moving their appli-cations to cloud mod-els to achieve it agility: versatile demand-based s e r v e r a n d s t o r a g e capacities, utility-based pay-as-you-go billing, and flexible, developer-friendly resources. But the relatively static net-works interconnecting compute and storage elements limit the potential of data centers to meet business needs.

Software defined networking (SDn) aims to remove network barriers and bring about fully virtualized data centers that efficiently

move and change with the demands of your business. “SDn is about getting the network out of the way of applications,” says Sunil Khandekar, CEo of nuage networks. “it’s about mak-ing the network easily con-sumable by applications by making it programmable and highly automated. it’s about abstraction of net-work capability and the automation of network provisioning.”

SDN and Operational Efficiencythe costs of operating a network have both financial and time dimensions. Khandekar

explains that moves, adds and changes in today’s networks are done by committee. “there’s the LAn, WAn and VLAn teams and the sys admin. there’s the auditing and com-pliance team and the firewall and appliances teams. they all have to review the changes to be made, and then schedule a mainte-nance window. it’s just a crazy amount of time required, and even after that, you’re not guar-anteed error-free provisioning of the network.”

SDn’s programmability links policy tem-plates to applications, and then applies the templates as application demands change. the result is sharply reduced deployment times and increased consis-tency and predictability. instead of adapt-ing applications to the limits of network flexibility and deployment lead times, an SDn responds in real time to application demands. And as the dynamics of virtu-alized compute and storage change, the network changes with them.

By JEff DOylE

For a company employing thousands of developers, making them just 10% to 15% more efficient results in huge operational savings.

SDN is about getting the network out of the way of applications.”— Sunil KhandeKar

CEO, NuaGE NEtWOrkS

the key is tying the network into the same orchestration systems that control compute and storage, and adding a directory of virtu-alized services that tracks policies, analytics and business logic. For a company employ-ing thousands of developers, making them just 10% to 15% more efficient results in huge operational savings.

nuage networks is already demonstrating reduced operational expenses to its customers. “We’ve demonstrated that we could effectively have close to a 50% reduction in opEx, up to 10 times improvement in turn-up and response time, and up to a 40% increase in asset utiliza-tion,” Khandekar says.

SDN and CapEx Savingsimproved asset utilization is an essential fac-tor in reducing capital expenditures, too. Data center virtualization has already increased server utilization by spreading workloads more efficiently across available resources. Virtualizing network elements, from routers and switches to firewalls, load balancers and cache engines, promises the same levels of resource sharing.

Current network practices can be thought of as hardware-defined networking. recon-figuration involves “touching” each net-work device and interacting with a vendor-specific operating system and command line interface. introducing new features or increasing performance can mean expen-sive rip-and-replace projects. SDn promises much simpler, much faster, more incremen-tal network upgrades through the addi-tion of software elements instead of hard-ware elements. most important, improved resource sharing means you can run longer on the network you have.

Democratizing the NetworkSDn grew out of academic networks, where researchers wished to develop custom net-work functions specific to their needs. this continues to be the promise of SDn: it reduces dependency on vendor development cycles, and your network becomes purpose-built to support your unique business dynamics. Khandekar calls it democratizing the network.

“SDn means disruptive innovation,” he says. “rather than preserve the legacy of the hardware platform, we’ve virtualized it and offered a sophisticated networking capabil-ity, and then democratized that by bringing it to enterprise networking.” n

Contact us to see how we can transform your network to meet the demands

of any application, any cloud, every time. www.nuagenetworks.net

Nuage Networks delivers NOW to datacenter networks for the cloud era.

NOW is virtualization & automation that transforms your network from a barrier to an engine of opportunity.

It’s effortless connection, for thousands of applications.

NOW is a network that’s more responsive, programmable and unconstrained.

What’s more, NOW isn’t coming tomorrow.

NOW is here today.

as and as your cloud applications need them to be

networks

MKT2014076577_NN_Forbes SDN 117x254mm_Ad.indd 1 14-09-10 2:47 PM