Using Software-Defined Networking to Enable a Software-Defined Environment Across the Enterprise

WHITE PAPER

Using Software-Defined Networking to Enable a

Software-Defined Environment Across the Enterprise

Sponsored by: IBM Brad Casemore January 2014

IDC OPINION

The growth of virtualization, the rise of cloud, and the simultaneous need for operational and business agility are compelling enterprises to adopt software-defined infrastructure (SDI) that automates and expedites provisioning, simplifies configuration and management, and integrates seamlessly with standards-based technologies and cloud orchestration platforms. Within the context of SDI, such as IBM's Software-Defined Environment (SDE), software-defined networking (SDN) plays an integral and valuable role, ensuring that the network infrastructure can be dynamically provisioned and elastically allocated to respond to the policy-based requirements of applications and their workloads as they evolve throughout their life cycle.

This white paper examines the factors and trends that have given rise to SDN, explains SDN's role within an SDE, considers how SDN addresses the infrastructure-related challenges enterprises confront as they transition to cloud computing, and looks at IBM's approach to SDN within SDE. This white paper includes a summary of the challenges and opportunities of IBM's approach to SDN and SDE.

SITUATION OVERVIEW

SDN Driven by New Workloads, Network Traffic Patterns,

and Cloud Computing

An SDE optimizes the entire computing infrastructure — compute, storage, and network resources — so that it can adapt continuously and intelligently to workload requirements. In an SDE, workloads are dynamically assigned to IT resources based on application characteristics, resource availability, and service-level policies. This results in a systemic approach that can deliver continuous, dynamic optimization and reconfiguration of infrastructure in support of application workloads.

An integral component of the SDE is SDN, an architectural approach to networking that denotes a decoupling of a network device's control and data planes. Additionally, SDN delivers essential abstractions and southbound and northbound interfaces that are intended to provide the network with

Why SDN, and Why Now?

The need for SDN has been prompted primarily by the rise of cloud computing, though other factors also are at play. The growth of the public and private clouds, for example, has been accompanied by

changing traffic patterns and the consumerization of IT, exemplified by the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon. The union of these trends in computing has resulted in the need to support dynamic and ever-growing mobile applications that require network agility. Furthermore, a new wave of data analytics, often referred to as Big Data, requires a scale-out network approach that closely aligns with scale-out compute models, providing dynamic any-to-any connectivity and cost-effective bandwidth. As enterprises and service providers virtualized their servers, applications, and storage — and

especially as they began to adopt cloud computing — they recognized the inherent limitations of traditional networking technologies, architectures, and operational models. Simply put, the traditional network could not keep pace with the demands placed on it by virtualization, cloud, mobility, data analytics, and social media. Taken together, these new forces demand a network infrastructure that can deliver scale, programmability, agility, correlated application-down analytics, support for the hybrid cloud, and an integrated management model.

On the virtualization front alone, IDC forecasts that the number of virtual machines (VMs) deployed in 2017 will be 5.5 times greater than the number of VMs installed in 2008. VM growth will be robust throughout that period, even as server growth remains modest. IDC forecasts that from 2012 to 2017, VM densities will expand 38%. This growth alone is compelling enterprise customers and cloud service providers to seriously rethink their infrastructure requirements (see Figure 1).

FIGURE 1

Virtualization Buildout Continues Strong, 2008-2017

Source: Worldwide Virtual Machine 2013–2017 Forecast: Virtualization Buildout Continues Strong (IDC #242762, August 2013)

0 5,000,000 10,000,000 15,000,000 20,000,000 25,000,000 30,000,000 35,000,000 40,000,000 45,000,000 50,000,000 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 Nonvirtualized physical servers

Virtualized physical servers Virtualized logical servers

(N um ber o f d e p loy me nt s)

IDC has found that enterprises perceive the private cloud as the on-ramp to hybrid and public clouds. As these customers begin their cloud journeys, they are shifting their IT focus to management and automation that can provide greater agility and elasticity (see Figure 2).

FIGURE 2

IT Management Priorities for the Next Three Years

n = 201 Notes:

Multiple selections were permitted.

For more details, see Systems Management Software Purchasing Priorities Must Focus on Productivity and Simplification in 2013

(IDC #239056, January 2013).

Source: IDC's IT Management QuickPoll Survey, January 2013

Customers are also finding that the problems associated with an outdated architectural model are exacerbated by an outmoded operational approach. Adding and moving devices in a traditional network involved manual configuration involving command line interfaces (CLIs). Such work is time consuming and personnel intensive and, for those reasons, tended to delay and inhibit deployment of new applications and services. But, as noted previously, the network architecture and accompanying technologies were problematic too. Network oversubscription might have sufficed in an era of n-tier, client/server application workloads. However, virtualization, mobility, and cloud created demand for a new approach that could deliver flexibility, scalability, and agility — for both cost savings and for the ability to support new workloads and services promptly.

0 10 20 30 40 50

Shift from on-premise to SaaS-based management

Aggressively invest in automation and orchestration

Reduce number of management software vendors and tools

Implement common management software, services, and processes across cloud and

noncloud environments

Improve IT staff productivity and operational efficiency

As a result, the traditional network represented a bottleneck and an impediment to the full realization of the business benefits associated with virtualization and cloud. Whereas applications could be spun up as VMs within minutes as required, as could the application's virtual storage, provisioning full multitier virtual systems takes weeks or months. The network (e.g., switches, firewalls, load balancers, DDoS protection appliances) remained manual (by CLI rather than by GUI or other programmatic means) and relatively slow, taking weeks or months, effectively costing the organization time, money, and opportunity. SDN provides an alternative approach, a means of bringing the network into closer alignment with applications and of bringing the network up to speed with advances in datacenter computing and storage. Rather than getting in the way, the network, with SDN, can play an integral role in providing the operational and technological agility required for cloud computing. On this point, it is critical to realize that SDN is valuable not in and of itself but because of what it enables as an architectural approach: automated provisioning, network virtualization, greater top-down visibility into the network as a dynamic resource pool, and integration with cloud orchestration systems.

That's why SDN has been championed by a growing number of hyperscale datacenters, cloud service providers, wireless and wireline carriers, and cloud-oriented enterprises looking to leverage hybrid cloud capabilities such as cloudbursting, workload mobility, and follow-the-sun operational models.

The Value of SDN as an Integral Part of the Software-Defined Environment

In helping to solve the problem of the network in an age of virtualization and cloud, SDN plays an integral role in contributing to the SDE, which spans not only the datacenter but also the entire

enterprise, including multiple datacenters. In helping to automate, program, and virtualize the network, SDN helps bring to fruition an SDE that delivers automated and policy-driven management of

underlying pools of infrastructure for compute, storage, and networking — all in service to application teams pursuing access to infrastructure resources throughout the application life cycle. Consequently, by closely aligning the application life cycle to the operations life cycle, the SDE accelerates

application deployment by automating infrastructure provisioning based on application requirements. Lower-value commodity resources are assigned to lower-value workloads (such as test/dev), whereas mission-critical production workloads receive prioritized access to prized infrastructure.

In this context, it is important to understand that SDN is about more than the network. SDN is important because it modernizes the network infrastructure, making it relevant and valuable for virtualized workloads, cloud computing, enterprise mobility, Big Data, and various types of social computing and networking. SDN is an inevitable response to traditional networking's lack of innovation and rigidity, a long-awaited infusion of vitality that enables the network to make a crucial contribution to both cost savings and real business value henceforth. Rather than being a cost center, the network, in

conjunction with the other components of datacenter infrastructure encompassed by SDE, becomes a fundamental vehicle of unprecedented operational agility and policy-based service delivery.

The SDE, which IDC sees as falling within broader classification of what has been termed SDx, is the next major evolutionary step in the constant search for datacenter agility. Applications in a traditional datacenter, supporting client/server applications, could take months to deploy, and the various components operated in separate silos, with compute, storage, and networking representing distinct operational domains and specialized fiefdoms. Virtualization drove efficiency gains, with applications

deployed in days, even though it could still take weeks, or even months, for the datacenter network to be allocated and provisioned. Today, converged infrastructure promises to bring application

deployment in the datacenter down to hours. SDE will push the envelope even further, achieving automated application deployment in the datacenter in mere minutes, incorporating all elements of the datacenter — compute, network, and storage — in an orchestrated manner. The enabling technologies improving datacenter agility are illustrated in Figure 3.

FIGURE 3

Agility: The Never-Ending Journey

Source: IDC, 2014

SDE will achieve the next level of datacenter agility through pervasive, top-down automation and an orchestrated management framework that includes key application-related definitions and correlations, policies, and service levels that can be applied and enforced across the pools of underlying

infrastructure. Through a judicious blend of industry-standard northbound and southbound APIs and protocols, applications can directly interface with datacenter infrastructure, including network infrastructure, to deliver top-down provisioning on the fly, setting a new precedent for datacenter agility. Ideally, this should all come together based on open standards, represented by technology platforms such as OpenStack, where community contributions produce a broad range of customer choice, interoperability, ongoing innovation, and reduced overall solution costs.

Months to deploy Traditional Days Virtualization Hours Converged Minutes SD(x)

IBM'S SDN STRATEGY

IBM has witnessed changing business requirements that are creating complexity and volatility in IT, especially in the datacenter. Existing models of business operations — spanning enterprise

applications, core data and transactions, and operational analytics — are being affected by new modes of customer and stakeholder engagement, including mobile, social, Big Data analytics, and cloud. Workloads, too, are in transition, moving from traditional and hardwired to programmable applications and services.

Key Trends Driving IBM's Strategy Around SDE

IBM recognizes that the technology drivers of social, mobile, cloud, and Big Data have resulted in a few major trends:

 Growing scale/lower barrier to entry. An expansion in the number of users of smart devices, sensors, transactions, and computations has resulted in the concomitant growth of structured and unstructured data. IDC notes that in 2013 the total of all digital data created reached 4ZB, or 4 x 1021, nearly four times 2010 volumes. IDC forecasts digital data will grow to 40ZB by 2020 (IDC's Digital Universe Study 2012 sponsored by EMC). A growing number of easy-to-consume application programming interfaces (APIs) for integration with applications, platforms, and infrastructure are lowering the barrier to entry.

 Increasing complexity/yet more consumable. The volume, variety, and velocity of data are contributing to the increasing complexity of data management and workloads and of the

advanced analytics needed to discern valuable business insights. For example, novel algorithms to analyze large graphs are resource intensive, and new kinds of data management for these graph structures are required. At the same time, users are becoming more sophisticated, demanding interactive tools for business and scientific visual analytics. The mobile phone has evolved from a simple voice device to a multimedia communications tool capable of uploading and downloading data, text, audio, and video while also functioning as a global positioning system, wallet, FM radio, television, alarm clock, thermometer, address book, newspaper, camera, and more. Mobile devices increase the demand for rapid multitier system deployment and high-bandwidth delivery. For example, a product advertisement can generate a social media spike in related product content, which can be detected by a Big Data analytics application and used to offer product incentives through mobile channels (e.g., text messages, emails, Twitter).  An ever-faster pace. Disruptive new models for development and consumption are emerging

and increasingly penetrating the enterprise ecosystem, resulting in rapid innovation and decreased time to value. Moreover, componentized hardware and software are available off the cloud. New Web front-end pay-per-use service models are experiencing rapid growth. Social media is influencing how developer and open source communities are engaging in this global ecosystem. Massive open online courses are experiencing exponential growth, making education and training more accessible.

Given all these trends, IBM sees SDE as building a programmable infrastructure that ultimately leads to simplified operations, dramatically reduced time to value, and significantly improved business outcomes, both in relation to reduced operating and capital expenditures and in relation to business' ability to respond to events and opportunities as they arise.

An IBM SDE Is Workload or Application Aware

That said, IBM believes a key distinction in its vision for SDE involves a focus on ensuring that all infrastructure, including the datacenter network, is workload or application aware. In practical terms, this means that the infrastructure can dynamically adapt to the unique requirements of applications ranging from traditional n-tier enterprise applications to Web 2.0 services and Hadoop workloads. In IBM's vision, the underlying physical IT resources, which IBM classifies as SDI, are virtualized and programmable so that they can be dynamically reconfigured as needed. In the next layer up in the SDE stack, IBM provides interfaces to IT constituencies such as software development teams and architects so that they can accelerate service (or application) delivery to maximize time to value. At the heart of these capabilities are "patterns of expertise," or predefined configurations, which perform the "heavy lifting" associated with assembling and correlating resources to applications. Accordingly, developers no longer need concern themselves with the nuances of the underlying infrastructure when building a solution. Instead, software automation now handles these tasks using solution definitions provided by the line of business. Furthermore, software also ensures that the entire SDE, including the underlying SDN infrastructure, is continuously optimized to ensure that desired business outcomes are delivered after the application workload is provisioned.

When one looks at this model from a top-down perspective, one can envision development and IT operations teams working together to establish business rules and policies that then flow down and are enforced to effectively orchestrate the coordinated allocation of SDE infrastructure, also known as SDI, which communicates with the higher-layer applications using open northbound and southbound APIs. From a software and policy perspective, starting from the highest plane or layer, one would find the following:

 Solution definition: Defines business needs and identifies service opportunities and requirements

 Software pattern: Links the solution to a recommended application topology (e.g., middleware, load balancers), leveraging best practices and expertise

 Infrastructure pattern: Maps the software pattern to optimal infrastructure (e.g., storage, networks, VMs) based on business rules

 SDI: Automatically orchestrates deployment and update of workloads across physical infrastructure (compute, network, storage)

 Continuous optimization: Analytics-based optimization to maximize outcomes related to workload delivery in order to accommodate changes in the environment

The IBM SDE as an Open Platform

IBM also believes SDE, by its very nature, must be built on open foundations. The technologies that underlie IBM's SDE solution, including key components and interfaces, are derived from the

company's direct involvement with the following open source standards and communities. In detail:  OpenStack provides interoperability, agility, and flexibility through a common cloud computing

stack.

 OpenDaylight offers a unified, interoperable open SDN platform that supports an ecosystem of automated network services.

 The OpenPOWER Consortium enables industry for advanced datacenter technologies.  The Open Virtualization Alliance and oVirt help deliver open and cost-effective virtualization

alternatives.

 The Cloud Standards Customer Council provides datacenter customers with freedom of choice, flexibility, and openness relating to critical IT decisions.

IBM SDE as a Comprehensive Platform

For a solution to truly qualify as an SDE, it must be comprehensive. Understandably, IBM contends that an SDE should necessarily be holistic, spanning compute, networking, storage, and orchestration. In IBM's SDE offering, a layer of workload definitions, optimization, and orchestration sits atop a layer comprising applications and infrastructure patterns. Below that is a layer for resource abstraction and optimization support by IBM's OpenStack platform supported by IBM's Platform Resource Scheduler. IBM then provides drivers that interface with OpenStack's Nova (compute), Cinder/Swift (storage), and Neutron (networking) projects.

The underlying network infrastructure for IBM's SDE is constituted by overlays for existing networks and OpenFlow-enabled fabrics for new networks. While either approach provides the data and management plane separation required, an hybrid overlay/physical approach creates a network infrastructure with additional flexibility and control. IBM SDN for Virtualized Environments (SDN VE) offers unified control for overlay and physical networks. Virtual switches for multiple hypervisors (VMware and KVM today) provide network virtualization and federated control on top of existing networks. OpenFlow-enabled switches provide the line-rate physical network and the gateway to non-SDN networks. The unified overlay and OpenFlow SDN VE controller, based on OpenDaylight, integrates with IBM's SmartCloud software and supports OpenStack's Neutron APIs. IBM is investing in enabling network services chaining with the SDN VE connectivity service for IBM and partner appliances (e.g., intrusion prevention systems, firewalls, load balancers).

The upshot for customers is an SDE offering, including an integral SDN component, which provides benefits for business and IT constituencies alike (see Table 1). Those benefits are derived from making infrastructure more responsive, more simple, and more adaptive.

TABLE 1

Business and IT Benefits of a Software-Defined Environment

Responsiveness Simplification Adaptability

For the business buyer

Increased competitive advantage through accelerated differentiation and an ability to respond better and faster to market changes

Decreased costs for

maintenance and support while providing more time and resources for innovative new services

Increased customer satisfaction and higher productivity

For the IT buyer Improved service quality and efficiencies, especially in relation to better resource utilization

Higher levels of productivity and better alignment with business objectives; improved service performance from centralized management of resources

Easier, faster ways to provision new services as well as higher productivity from the dev/ops teams supporting new workloads and processes Source: IDC, 2014

CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES

In delivering SDN as part of a comprehensive SDE solution for its enterprise and service provider customers seeking to better align their infrastructure with their next-generation application workloads, IBM confronts several critical challenges and opportunities.

Challenges

 Articulate a differentiated value proposition. IBM must articulate a value proposition that differentiates its approach to network virtualization and datacenter virtualization from

competing approaches from vendors as diverse as VMware, Cisco, Juniper, and Nuage. Some competitors, such as Cisco in traditional networking and VMware in virtualization, will leverage account presence and existing relationships with core IT constituencies to ensure that they see deal flow and have an opportunity to define the customer dialogue. These vendors will place great emphasis on how prior investments can be protected and leveraged as customers progress toward having a network infrastructure, as well as a holistic datacenter infrastructure, that can support their business objectives.

 Convey the benefits of SDN and SDE to all customer stakeholders. IBM must ensure that it delivers a compelling message to all pertinent constituencies affected by SDN and SDE. It must ensure that customers understand how SDN contributes to and helps realize the greater value inherent to SDE. The relative success of this message will depend not only on the

realize from the adoption of IBM's solution. As the infrastructure, including the network, becomes more closely aligned with the application workloads it supports, the business and IT teams that define and support those workloads will become similarly aligned. IBM must understand the needs and requirements of all relevant stakeholders.

 Clearly communicate SDN and SDE integration with cloud orchestration systems. IBM must explain how its SDN and SDE solutions integrate with cloud orchestration systems

(OpenStack, CloudStack, VMware, etc.) and with existing management and datacenter automation tools. Some of these tools will relate to network management, others will be tools for automated server management, and still others will be tools for application performance management. In the brave new worlds of SDN and SDE, ecosystem support becomes a critical element of success.

Opportunities

 Leverage IBM capabilities into a complete private or hybrid cloud solution. As customers make the voyage to private and hybrid clouds, IBM, with its vast array of technologies and service capabilities, has a significant opportunity to become a trusted, valued partner for enterprises seeking to ensure that their networks and other infrastructure assets are well placed to deliver on the potential and value associated with private and public clouds. With its support for open standards and open platforms, as well as a professional services capability that is among the strongest in the industry, IBM can position itself as being able to consider its customers' "big picture" interests while having the acumen and wherewithal to deliver on the vision.  Gain leadership in datacenter networking with SDE. Through SDN and network virtualization,

integrated into a broader SDE offering, IBM has an opportunity to establish a leadership position in networking that could complement and enhance its existing datacenter presence as a vendor of compute, storage, and management products and technologies. Again, IBM has the resources — represented by its operational and technical intelligence, its relationships with an extensive base of enterprise customers across many vertical markets, and its professional services capabilities — to incorporate SDN as an integral linchpin of a comprehensive SDE. IBM also has partnerships, and a broad ecosystem, that can help it enlist vendors that provide complementary and adjacent technologies.

 Provide software intelligence and data analytics with a software-aware network. IBM sold more than $25 billion in software in 2012. As noted previously in this document, applications can be made aware of the network infrastructure so that they can perform in better accordance with business and operational objectives. Additionally, IBM can leverage its WebSphere, DB2, and Cloud software to offer completely automated multitier system software patterns that include network devices (e.g., switches, intrusion prevention systems, firewalls, load balancers). Many applications, for example, can parse data to detect clever insights (e.g., they can scan server logs to detect a security breach). Such information is usually only locally relevant, with limited impact on network infrastructure. With SDN, which opens up the interfaces to the network, applications are able to communicate these insights to the SDN controller, which can make appropriate modifications to network data flows. The result is that IBM could provide software intelligence and data analysis capabilities to network infrastructure.

CONCLUSION

IDC recognizes that a number of factors, including virtualization and cloud computing, have exposed the inherent limitations of traditional approaches to datacenter network architectures and operations. SDN has arisen as an architectural approach that helps the network come up to speed with other aspects of datacenter infrastructure, including compute and storage.

Rather than being an impediment to application and service provisioning, and serving merely as an inhibiting cost center in IT departments, the datacenter network under SDN has the ability to confer significant business and technical benefits to organizations seeking to fully harness and benefit from advances such as virtualization, cloud, mobility, and Big Data.

What's more, SDN, in providing greater network agility and programmability, provides a critical element in the SDE, which spans not only the datacenter but also the entire enterprise, including multiple datacenters. It also extends across all datacenter infrastructure — networking, compute, and storage — providing automated and policy-driven management of underlying resource pools in service to

business-critical application workloads.

IBM has developed an approach to SDN and SDE that is built atop open standards and open source software — for cloud orchestration, SDN, compute, virtualization, and datacenter operations — but that also includes contributions from its own in-house products and technologies.

Although IBM faces a number of formidable competitors with alternative approaches to both SDN and virtualized datacenter infrastructure, the company has the knowledge, means, and resources to deliver a comprehensive SDE that leverages both software overlays for SDN network virtualization and OpenFlow-enabled switches and controllers.

IBM's breadth and depth, across all infrastructure encompassed within the datacenter, qualify the company as an SDE solution provider that should be considered and evaluated by enterprises and cloud service providers seeking to ensure that their infrastructure offers the agility, flexibility, and responsiveness required to support the dynamic service-oriented workloads that will inhabit the next-generation datacenter.

About This Document

This document was developed by IDC with IBM assistance and funding. This document may utilize information, including publicly available data, provided by various companies and sources, including IBM. The opinions are those of the document's author and do not necessarily represent IBM's position.

About IDC

International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make fact-based decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1000 IDC analysts provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends in over 110 countries worldwide. For more than 48 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clients achieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading

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