Connecting the dots between SDN and a more capable cloud.
Network fabrics have been all the rage for the past couple of years. Almost every network vendor now has a “fabric” vision and related product set to address the shift from legacy networks to “cloud-ready” data center networks.
Cloud computing, though, is not and should not be isolated to a single physical data center. From a utopian vision, one day, many years from now, computing will be driven from a set of interconnected clouds.
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An Extreme Approach to Software Defined Networking
This is the vision behind Ciena’s “Data Center Without Walls” campaign. The traditional network vendors are focusing on building out that robust, East-West optimized internal network and Ciena is trying to solve the problem of how one goes about interconnecting the data centers together to create a larger, virtual data center made up of two or more physical data centers. To do this, Ciena is leveraging good old software-defined networking (SDN).
The Ciena SDN portfolio is made up of its packet optical platforms for the interconnection and transport, programmable modulation and interfaces to allow applications and service providers to automatically control and adjust bandwidth “on the fly” when required. Common use cases for this level of programmable automation can be issues like workload balancing to move resources consistently between data centers, the automated movement of resources for disaster recovery purposes or just being able to manage traffic when an unpredictable load hits the network.
I think the disaster recovery implications of SDNs is one of the more mundane, but important use cases for SDNs and cloud. With the ability to automate workload migration and coordinate it with storage transport and network virtualization, it’s possible for cloud providers and enterprises to get to a recovery point objective of near zero for critical business applications. Historically, 24 hours was considered adequate recovery time, but cloud now makes it possible for DR to be real time. This, of course, assumes the network can automatically adjust itself to handle hundreds of TBs of data, putting a vendor like Ciena in a strong position.
The interconnection of clouds is one of the stronger uses cases for SDNs, since the creation of a larger, virtual cloud from connected clouds requires tight coordination between the network, compute and VM infrastructure. The automation that SDNs can bring can deliver the right amount of predictable network resource, when and where needed. Trying to accomplish this without the use of network programmability requires too much manual intervention to scale.
Ciena certainly isn’t the most well-known enterprise network vendor, but they’re very well adopted by companies where the network matters and, in many ways, is the business. Financial institutions, hosting providers and stock exchanges are examples of the types of companies that use Ciena today. The shift to cloud computing broadens the concept of “the network is the business” to almost every vertical as the long-term success depends on the underlying network that supports the cloud and that network exists inside and between the data centers.
