Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Connecting Islands of Resources in an SDN Data Center

Application Agility is Critical
Organizations are rolling out new applications that they use to drive the business. These applications are virtualized. They are increasingly distributed, dynamic and they can span locations. They connect employees, customers and the supply chain. They make employees more productive, help customers to engage with the business and facilitate better inventory management. They also provide timely business intelligence.  This means revenue to the organization. Time to deploy is critical. Organizations need to be agile when it comes to deploying new applications.

The problem is that the network is an obstacle. Due to the complexity of configuring the network speed of deployment is an issue. There are so many things that need to be configured. You need to configure route mapping, port mapping, VLAN mapping, QOS, NAT, ACLs and the list goes on.  The networking side hasn’t changed since it was invented decades ago. It takes weeks to configure the network connections that are needed when you deploy an application.

Organizations have been using server virtualization for years to overcome the limitations of physical server virtualization. When you have to deploy a physical server it could take weeks from the time you first knew you needed it until it was up and running. Now provisioning virtual servers only takes minutes. With virtualized servers we realized agility and resilience and improved physical server utilization. We need the same type of benefits for the network. You can’t let the network get in the way when you need to move fast and gain the advantages of new applications. Organizations are looking for ways to provision the network work quickly.