Sunil Khandekar, CEO and founder of Nuage Networks (an Alcatel-Lucent venture), explains how SDN is not the end game, but a key enabler in looking at networks in a different way for the cloud era
SDN Insights: Nuage’s message highlights the removal of constraints in data center networks to unleash the full power of the cloud. What constraints are you talking about here?
Sunil Khandekar: We want to make networking as readily consumable as personal computing. Virtual machines that support cloud applications can be deployed in minutes, so waiting days for networking connectivity isn’t acceptable. Unfortunately, that’s still the tolerated norm - even with network virtualization, major constraints and artificial boundaries must be scrapped to inspire broad adoption.
Others may offer virtualized islands of assets, or continue to propagate lock-in with vertically integrated solutions. But Nuage delivers cloud network automation and virtualization that is agnostic to existing networking hardware and provides instantaneous policy-based network action within and across data centers, across hypervisors and cloud management systems and across virtualized and bare-metal environments, with seamless VPN connectivity to private data centers and branch locations and using a unified policy framework that helps enterprises retain full control and visibility.
How does SDN help remove those constraints?
SDN is a fundamental shift incorporating network programmability through abstraction and network reflexiveness through automation. Abstraction separates application needs from network delivery of requisite connectivity and network services. Network admins are freed from cumbersome tracking and mapping of extraneous networking parameters, and can easily deliver the capabilities that their workgroups and applications require. A policy-based mechanism for network connectivity automation allows users to define a broadly applicable hierarchy of permissions. The result: secure, instantaneous connectivity for applications and their users, anytime, anyplace, on any cloud.
SDN decouples network control and services from underlying infrastructure, resulting in a more open, flexible and efficient network that supports the needs of today’s businesses and workgroups where change is the norm and instant gratification expected.