With Nuage Networks from Nokia SDN, IT departments can set up networks as easily as if they were setting up virtual server instances, said Waleed Badr, regional director – META at Nuage Networks from Nokia, speaking to Telecom Review about the challenges and advantages of software defined networking (SDN). Nuage Networks SDN solutions bring massive scalability and high programmability to datacenters and wide area networks.
Why has SDN emerged as such an important part of any enterprise network?
The value of cloud services lies in the rapid and cost-effective instantiation of applications that can be consumed as needed by users anywhere. With cloud services, enterprises can broadly deploy applications very quickly to meet their business needs while enjoying the benefits of simplified operations. In fact, enterprises expect the cloud to deliver the experience of a private IT infrastructure with the superior economics of a shared infrastructure.
DevOps teams will likely be among the first and most important beneficiaries of SDN capabilities. These teams are under enormous pressure to deliver new services and applications much quicker than ever before. Application availability is not a luxury anymore. Strengthening disaster recovery and business continuity, and ensuring high availability of services and applications at all times is not an option anymore.
In enterprise, it sometimes feels as if regulatory compliance is a moving target, which requires a different approach to handle security and compliance within today’s DC to protect our sensitive data and applications in an automated pattern.
What are the advantages of SDN over traditional networking architecture?
With Nuage Networks from Nokia SDN, IT departments can set up networks as easily as if they were setting up virtual server instances. This is a breakthrough for DevOps teams in that they can now.
You can drive innovation by not having to work through long work order-driven processes to deliver network services for new applications. You can also improve the quality of new applications and services by enabling developers to work through more iterations and feedback loops in a much more condensed time frame.
Nokia Nuage Networks provides an architectural foundation to eliminate performance bottlenecks and build dynamic, agile and scalable networks that are “future proofed”. Nokia Nuage Networks brings a new definition of DC interconnectivity, business continuity and disaster recovery to our important applications and sensitive data.
While we are busy building our security stack from different security vendors, 100 percent protection is still not available. Nokia Nuage Networks will switch the light on with full visibility to virtual work load, physical workload and branches.
What are the challenges of implementing SDN into an existing network?
Nuage Networks’ agnostics approach allows our clients to implement SDN\SD-WAN to a brown (existing network) or green field landscape in a smooth way. Nokia Nuage Networks is a hypervisor of agnostics support containers and physical infrastructure as well.
With Nuage Networks’ agnostic approach toward the DC networking switches and cloud management platform, Nokia assures to unlock our clients from any proprietary or vendor locking. Nokia professional services allow our clients to have world class services during implementation and 24/7 technical support across 170+ countries.
Is it wise to currently rely fully on network virtualization and SDN?
Datacenter network implementations of the last decade are simply not sustainable in the cloud services era. Traditionally, static network element management utilities have been stitched together within a manager-of-managers (MoM) model, requiring massive integration and proving to be very complex to operate and maintain.
This methodology has left datacenter operators architecturally constrained as they strive toward network automation for delivering cloud services rapidly and at scale. Outdated MoM-based models must yield to a new paradigm in order to meet the ambitions of CSPs whose success hinges on multi-tenancy, massive scale and operational efficiency.
Absolutely, SDN & SD-WAN is required to help our clients to:
Connect users to applications anywhere anytime on virtual platform
Achieve operation excellence
Conduct better business continuity and disaster recovery policies
Have better visibility, agile incident response and self-defense network (SDN)
Ironically, the above SDN business drivers are the same reasons why some clients might fear network virtualization. Nokia Nuage Networks is a telco grade solution in terms of scalability and reliability and an enterprise solution in terms of the operation.
Are there any projects that represent a good opportunity to pilot SDN?
SDN and SD-WAN opportunities are everywhere across the globe. Nuage Networks is a customer centric company where we conduct a lot of sessions on a daily basis with our clients. We see in every client an opportunity to help and support. Apart from financial, manufacturing, government or service providers, retailers will have different objectives having SDN or SD-WAN.
Every client looks for:
Virtualization of DC networking and WAN connectives to respond to applications dynamically
Micro-Segmentations, PCI compliance and multi-tenants within existing DC components
Datacenter interconnectivity, disaster recovery or business continuity for many datacenters in an active-active mode
Full-mesh reliable branch to branch connectivity in a secure manner
What are the long-term benefits of implementing SDN?
With Nuage Networks from Nokia, the scale and reach of datacenter network services extend as needs grow. Connectivity to VPN services ensures that enterprise locations and datacenters can be part of a seamless fabric. This is essential for delivering hybrid cloud service offerings.
In many cases, enterprises wish to keep certain databases and servers within their own private infrastructure to ensure maximum security or compliance. The Nuage Networks approach integrates that key requirement through seamless interconnection with Ethernet (L2 VPN) or IP (L3 VPN) services that already interconnect enterprise sites securely.
As a result, cloud bursting and hybrid cloud services are not just made possible; they are unleashed in a highly dynamic and robust manner that is an elegant extension of existing wide area data services. The Nuage Networks solution enables CSPs to deliver these capabilities across thousands of tenants within their infrastructure, each of whom is comprised of many different groups.
Nuage Networks is a virtual service platform allowing our clients today to stretch their DC to the branches or public cloud in a full mesh topology with their network and security terms.
How can a customer measure the ROI on completion of their project?
A customer doesn’t need to budget for SD-WAN because Nuage Networks SD-WAN reduces their current MPLS WAN OPEX for more than 50 percent. A customer doesn’t need to build two or three different solutions to support their virtual, physical or wide area networks. Nuage Networks ‘One’ controller will build a virtual network between the physical and virtual workload in addition to the branches.
With SD-WAN from Nuage Networks, our clients will build their next generation branches where they can collapse many hardware components Capex’s in one place. Nuage Networks virtual service platform will help our clients to protect the most valuable sensitive data within their network landscape.