Partner Article

SDN & NFV – next level enterprise IT

Many C-suite executives are 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.

The shift from hardware-centric to software-centric ICT holds many of the solutions though. There are several technologies in play, but for my money, the most noteworthy ones are SDN (Software-Defined Networking) and NFV (Network Functions Virtualisation).

NFV is akin to the server virtualisation many readers will be familiar with. It removes physical hardware devices like routers, firewalls or WAN accelerators from a customer’s data centre or server room and shifts the intelligence to an array of standardised services within the provider’s network.

SDN breaks a network down to its constituent parts: the network control is decoupled from packet forwarding. Think of SDN as the ‘brains’ layer – 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.

While often thought of as competitive, NFV and SDN are in fact complementary. Together, they can transform corporate networks by ensuring every element can be managed and controlled centrally, through software. They pave the way for ‘enterprise app stores’ of cloud and networking services, where ICT departments can manage various applications (such as Firewalls and SSL VPNs) via an online portal.

As a result SDN and NFV make it possible for new services to be provisioned within minutes, so that onsite deployment scalability challenges are removed. This means SDN and NFV can have a big impact on business competitiveness on all levels. Here’s how:

1. They reduce complexity by eliminating the ownership and management of thousands of network devices, bringing management to one central administrator portal

2. SDN and NFV improve security because ICT departments can create more systematic and streamlined security policies. Not only does this mean they can patch threats more quickly, but this approach also reduces human error that often lead to costly data breaches

3. Greater network agility is achieved because network functions are incorporated into the cloud. This gives administrators unprecedented control over the path of network packets, so bottlenecks can be pin-pointed easily and traffic redirected

4.SDN & NFV enable new ways of working, such as remote working, by making it faster and easier to give people VPN access or create a new network security policy. Instead of logging in and configuring all the devices involved, a network admin would simply configure or modify a policy on a central portal

5. They also save on cash – Gartner notes that SDN can result-in opex savings of $35 to $100 per year, per virtual server, and reduce capex on individual network devices by 50-70%. For example, our customers can turn on and buy services in real time within minutes and don’t have to invest upfront for a five year lock-in contract

With such benefits, it’s easy to see why Research and Market expect adoption of SDN and NFV to grow by 60 per cent between 2015 and 2020. From their beginnings in telecoms and now within the enterprise, the duo is revolutionising enterprise ICT in the way SaaS and PaaS are in applications.

The flexibility and scalability of SDN and NFV mean that enterprise ICT will always be ‘right-sized’ – businesses will only pay for the resources they use, while the asset-light approach means less of the ICT budget is spent on acquiring equipment and maintenance. This means that CIOs can design and roll out the global network infrastructures they need, on demand. It will be almost as easy as downloading an app from an app store.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Len Padilla, NTT Com .