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SDN in 2014: A year of non-stop action

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Review of dozens of SDN moves may hint at what’s in store for 2015

The past year was a frantic one in the SDN industry as many players made strategic and tactical moves to either get out ahead of the curve on software-defined networking, or try to offset its momentum.

December
Juniper unveils a version of its Junos operating system for Open Compute Platform switches, commencing a disaggregation strategy that’s expected to be followed by at least a handful of other major data center switching players in an effort to appeal to white box customers.

November
Cisco declares “game over” for SDN competitors, and perhaps the movement itself, prompting reaction from two industry groups that the game has just begun; Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper also virtualize their routers for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) requirements; AT&T and other unveil ONOS, an open source SDN operating system viewed as an alternative to the OpenDaylight Project’s code.

October
Cisco joins the Open Compute Project, 16 months after criticizing it as a one-trick white box commodity pony that has “weaknesses” and is destined to “lose;” Internet2 demonstrates a nationwide virtualized multitenant network, formed from SDN and 100G, that operates as multiple discrete, private networks; increased competition, largely as a result of VMware’s $1.26 billion acquisition of network virtualization start-up Nicira, goads Cisco into selling most of its stake in the VCE joint venture to EMC; Dell increases its participation in OpenDaylight after initially having doubts about the organization’s motivations; Start-up SocketPlane emerges to establish DevOps-defined networking; Cisco invests $80 into a cloud venture with Chinese telecom vendor TCL.

September
Cisco boosts its Intercloud initiative, an effort to interconnect global cloud networks, with 30+ new partners, 250 more data centers, and products to facilitate workload mobility between different cloud providers; HP opens its SDN App Store; Brocade becomes perhaps the first vendor to unveil an OpenDaylight-based SDN controller; Cisco loses two key officials in its Application Centric Infrastructure and OpenStack efforts; Cisco acquires OpenStack cloud provider Metacloud; Infonetics Research says the SDN market could hit $18 billion by 2018; SDN’s contribution to the Internet of Things becomes clearer.

July
A Juniper Networks sponsored study finds 52.5% yay, 47.5% nay on implementing SDNs; Cisco ships its ACI controller, and announces pricing and packaging of its programmable networking lineup; The IEEE forms a 25G Ethernet study group after a number of data center switching vendors with considerable operations in SDN and cloud form a consortium to pursue the technology; Big Switch Networks unveils its Cloud Fabric controller; The Open Networking User Group establishes working groups to address what it sees as the biggest pain points in networking, and issues a white paper describing the current challenges and future SDN needs; After initially claiming it wasn’t SDN, Cisco now says ACI is the “most complete” SDN; Cisco says its acquisition of cloud orchestrator Tail-f will complement its own Intelligent Automation for Cloud product.

June
Facebook unveils its homegrown “Wedge” SDN data center switch; Cisco acquires cloud orchestrator Tail-f, which gives it entrée into AT&T’s SDN project; HP unveils an SDN switch with a midplane-free chassis, similar to Cisco’s Nexus 9500; Market researchers find that SDN “hesitation” is slowing spending on routers and switches; Avaya, citing its experience at the Sochi Winter Olympic Games, describes a plan to ease implementation of SDN and other environments using its fabric technology.

May
HP clarifies its views on open source SDNs; A Goldman Sachs report concludes that Cisco’s ACI provides a 3X better total cost of ownership than VMware NSX; Cisco CEO Chambers dashes talk of Cisco acquiring cloud provider Rackspace; Cisco offers products to allow earlier generation Nexus switches to participate in a programmable ACI environment; SDN prompts more questions than answers at a Network World conference; Seven months after dismissing OpenDaylight and open source SDNs, HP raises its investment and participation in OpenDaylight; Cisco’s Noiro Networks open source project is revealed as a contributor to a policy blueprint approved for the OpenStack Neutron networking component.

April
CloudGenix debuts as the latest SDN start-up targeting enterprise WANs; Michael Dell shares his views on SDNs after his namesake company allies with SDN companies Big Switch Networks and Cumulus Networks; Juniper appears ready to accept OpenDaylight after initially dismissing it when it develops a plugin to link its own OpenContrail SDN controller to the open source code; Cisco and VMware take the SDN battle to the policy arena; Cisco unveils the OpFlex policy protocol, largely viewed as an alternative to OpenFlow and other southbound protocols, for ACI and SDNs.

March
New certifications are expected as SDN takes hold in the networking industry; three years after pledging not to enter cloud services and compete with its customers, Cisco enters cloud services through its $1 billion Intercloud initiative; Dell unveils a fabric switch and SDN controller designed to scale and automate OpenStack clouds; Cisco rolls out new chassis configurations for its Nexus 9000 switches, the hardware underlay of its ACI programmable networking response to SDN; OpenDaylight commissioned study concludes that everyone wants open source SDNs; Cumulus garners additional support for its bare metal NOS; SDN preparation may require 11 steps; Goldman Sachs says there’s nothing really new to SDNs; AT&T, NTT and others share SDN implementation experiences at Open Networking Summit 2014; Brocade becomes an early provider of OpenFlow 1.3; NEC looks to scale OpenFlow SDNs.

February
HP Networking head Bethany Mayer is tapped to lead the company’s new Network Functions Virtualization effort; Juniper expands its carrier SDN portfolio with controller and management products at Mobile World Congress; Research finds that enterprise adoption of SDNs lags that of service providers due to several factors, primarily the criticality of the network itself; Big Switch explains why it is optimistic after rebooting its SDN business; OpenDaylight announces that its “Hydrogen” SDN release is now available, after a delay; SDN start-up Pluribus Networks ships its server-switch product.

January
IBM is reported to be looking to sell its SDN business for $1 billion; JP Morgan downgrades Cisco stock based on challenges in emerging markets, and on the potential impact of SDNs; Cisco announces ACI Enterprise Module, a version of its ACI SDN controller for enterprise access and WAN programmability; ACG Research finds that sales of SDN products for live service provider deployments will reach $15.6 billion by 2018, while those that have live deployment potential will reach $29.5 billion; SDN startup Anuta Networks unveils a network services virtualization system for midsize and large enterprises; Reports surface that an SDN schism has developed at Juniper, pitting Junos and OpenDaylight programmers against CTO and Founder Pradeep Sindhu and prompting the exit of many engineers; AT&T determines that Cisco’s ACI is too complex and proprietary for its Domain 2.0 SDN project, according to an investment firm’s report.

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Weighing the IT implications of implementing SDNs

Software-defined anything has myriad issues for data centers to consider before implementation

Software Defined Networks should make IT execs think about a lot of key factors before implementation.

Issues such as technology maturity, cost efficiencies, security implications, policy establishment and enforcement, interoperability and operational change weigh heavily on IT departments considering software-defined data centers. But perhaps the biggest consideration in software-defining your IT environment is, why would you do it?
Prove to me there’s a reason we should go do this, particularly if we already own all of the equipment and packets are flowing. We would need a compelling use case for it.
— Ron Sackman, chief network architect at Boeing

“We have to present a pretty convincing story of, why do you want to do this in the first place?” said Ron Sackman, chief network architect at Boeing, at the recent Software Defined Data Center Symposium in Santa Clara. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Prove to me there’s a reason we should go do this, particularly if we already own all of the equipment and packets are flowing. We would need a compelling use case for it.”

[WHERE IT’S ALL GOING: VMware adds networking, storage to its virtual data center stack]

And if that compelling use case is established, the next task is to get everyone onboard and comfortable with the notion of a software-defined IT environment.

“The willingness to accept abstraction is kind of a trade-off between control of people and hardware vs. control of software,” says Andy Brown, Group CTO at UBS, speaking on the same SDDC Symposium panel. “Most operations people will tell you they don’t trust software. So one of the things you have to do is win enough trust to get them to be able to adopt.”

Trust might start with assuring the IT department and its users that a software-defined network or data center is secure, at least as secure as the environment it is replacing or founded on. Boeing is looking at SDN from a security perspective trying to determine if it’s something it can objectively recommend to its internal users.

“If you look at it from a security perspective, the best security for a network environment is a good design of the network itself,” Sackman says. “Things like Layer 2 and Layer 3 VPNs backstop your network security, and they have not historically been a big cyberattack surface. So my concern is, are the capex and opex savings going to justify the risk that you’re taking by opening up a bigger cyberattack surface, something that hasn’t been a problem to this point?”

Another concern Sackman has is in the actual software development itself, especially if a significant amount of open source is used.

“What sort of assurance does someone have – particularly if this is open source software – that the software you’re integrating into your solution is going to be secure,” he asks. “How do you scan that? There’s a big development time security vector that doesn’t really exist at this point.”

Policy might be the key to ensuring security and other operational aspects in place pre-SDN/SDDC are not disrupted post implementation. Policy-based orchestration, automation and operational execution is touted as one of SDN’s chief benefits.

“I believe that policy will become the most important factor in the implementation of a software-defined data center because if you build it without policy, you’re pretty much giving up on the configuration strategy, the security strategy, the risk management strategy, that have served us so well in the siloed world of the last 20 years,” UBS’ Brown says.

Software Defined Data Center’s also promise to break down those silos through cross-function orchestration of the compute, storage, network and application elements in an IT shop. But that’s easier said than done, Brown notes – interoperability is not a guarantee in the software-defined world.

“Information protection and data obviously have to interoperate extremely carefully,” he says. The success of software defined workload management – aka, virtualization and cloud – in a way has created a set of children, not all of which can necessarily be implemented in parallel, but all of which are required to get to the end state of the software defined data center.

“Now when you think of all the other software abstraction we’re trying to introduce in parallel, someone’s going to cry uncle. So all of these things need to interoperate with each other.”

So are the purported capital and operational cost savings of implementing SDN/SDDCs worth the undertaking? Do those cost savings even exist?

Brown believes they exist in some areas and not in others.
We’ve got massive cost targets by the end of 2015 and if I were backing horses, my favorite horse would be software-defined storage rather than software-defined networks.
— Andy Brown

“There’s a huge amount of cost take-out in software-defined storage that isn’t necessarily there in SDN right now,” he said. “And the reason it’s not there in SDN is because people aren’t ripping out the expensive under network and replacing it with SDN. Software-defined storage probably has more legs than SDN because of the cost pressure. We’ve got massive cost targets by the end of 2015 and if I were backing horses, my favorite horse would be software-defined storage rather than software-defined networks.”

Sackman believes the overall savings are there in SDN/SDDCs but again, the security uncertainty may make those benefits not currently worth the risk.

“The capex and opex savings are very compelling, and there are particular use cases specifically for SDN that I think would be great if we could solve specific pain points and problems that we’re seeing,” he says. “But I think, in general, security is a big concern, particularly if you think about competitors co-existing as tenants in the same data center — if someone develops code that’s going to poke a hole in the L2 VPN in that data center and export data from Coke to Pepsi.

“We just won a proposal for a security operations center for a foreign government, and I’m thinking can we offer a better price point on our next proposal if we offer an SDN switch solution vs. a vendor switch solution? A few things would have to happen before we feel comfortable doing that. I’d want to hear a compelling story around maturity before we would propose it.”

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