Making the Transition to an Open SDN Architecture in the Enterprise Private Cloud

Enterprise IT is moving away from acting as siloed service organizations to aligning with the business’ goals to help their organizations enhance their business agility, value and customer experience. Many of these organizations are moving to a cloud computing model to achieve these goals, but they haven’t determined the best strategy for making this transition.
Transitioning to the cloud will help these organizations accelerate innovation and business agility by emphasizing a number of important factors.  Adaptability is one.  Seamless scale, both upward and downward, is another. Network intelligence that will provide proactive resource optimization is a third.

To make this transition, organizations need the right infrastructure, and they must be prepared to answer questions regarding SDN, orchestration, security, network protocols and many other issues.

These are addressed by two application-aware architectures for the enterprise private cloud:

1.    Juniper Networks’ open SDN architecture

2.    A proprietary programmable architecture that requires investment in a centralized controller and application-aware switch combination.


The industry research organization ACG Research analyzed the cost of transitioning from state-of-the-art switching infrastructure to private cloud-based infrastructure for a medium sized enterprise data center.
They compared Juniper Networks’ open SDN architecture to a proprietary programmable architecture that requires simultaneous investment in a centralized controller and application-aware switch combination. The proprietary architecture requires parallel operation of the embedded switching equipment and new application-aware switches until all applications are moved to the new switches. In contrast, Juniper’s open SDN architecture does not require any change to the embedded equipment base.

The transition cost for each architectural alternative was analyzed for a medium-sized data center. The study found that open SDN provides full asset protection while the proprietary architecture destroys 88 percent of the value of the embedded switching investment in the first year. Juniper’s open SDN architecture fully protects the embedded switching investment by employing the Contrail open SDN controller, which operates as an overlay to the switching infrastructure underlay; it imposes no transition cost.

By comparison, the proprietary programmable architecture requires that simultaneous investments be made in a centralized controller and application-aware switch combination. This investment in a new controller and new data center switching equipment is equivalent to 88 percent of the embedded switching equipment investment in the first year alone. As such, most of the value of the embedded equipment base is destroyed.

To learn more see this paper, Business Case for Open SDN Architecture in Enterprise Private Cloud.