1
EDITOR’S NOTE
2
SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING GOES WELL BEYOND THE DATA CENTER
3
DATA CENTER NETWORK FABRICS VS. SOFTWARE- DEFINED NETWORKS
4
IS THE SOFTWARE-DEFINED DATA CENTER READY FOR PRIME TIME?
THE
SPRING 2013 \ VOL. 1 \ N0. 1k
k
k
k
Software-defined networking and data center network
fabrics complement each other to create flatter,
programmable networks.
The Software-Defined Data Center and
the Promise of End-To-End Orchestration
If you’re like me, you’re tired of IT terms like “cloud” or “convergence” being tossed around as marketing hype. And phrases like “software-defined data center” and soft-ware-defined storage” are starting to inspire eye rolling. After all, these days it seems that if something is software-defined, it’s got to be better—even if we don’t know why.
Software-defined networking (SDN) is a more devel-oped concept than software-defined storage, for example. Most articles on software-defined storage still begin with a discussion of what that really means. But I’ve come to understand that when it comes to the data center, the soft-ware-defined concept means one thing: the potential for end-to-end orchestration. And that’s exciting business.
The promise of server virtualization and cloud com-puting has been the automated provisioning of compute resources, but network and storage haven’t been able to change rapidly enough to support VM provisioning and migration.
Yet a software-defined data center ecosystem can change all of that. With SDN, we can build programmable, agile networks by reaching into the forwarding or data
plane to decide where specific flows should go. We can even spin up virtual network instances on demand. With software-defined storage, we can abstract the operating system, hypervisor and services controller for rapid provi-sioning and fine-tuned control across storage systems.
The software-defined data center will be integrated across systems so that these interdependent resources can be spun up together on demand, as needed. The larger soft-ware-defined data center ecosystem will mean that we can plug in any commodity server, network or storage hardware and use common software to abstract granular control of these resources. With that, data center convergence (one of those hyped IT terms) would finally become reality.
In this issue of The New Network, we explore what lies behind the software-defined data center. We hope it will show you the path toward that we’ve long envisioned—total orchestration and automation in a virtualized environ-ment. n
Rivka Gewirtz Little Executive Editor, Networking Media Group
The
software-defined data
center holds the
promise of
orchestration that
works across all
network, compute
and storage
resources.
Ω
With SDN, network engineers
will eventually be able to
improve security, management
and application performance
in the LAN and WAN—without
costly hardware.
software defined networking (SDN) is already changing the data center network, but now the technology could redefine other parts of the network, as well as the network engineering profession itself.
A host of start-ups, academic researchers and other net-work gurus are exploring the powerful flexibility and pro-grammability of SDN for strategies to make the LANs and WANs of tomorrow simpler to manage, more secure and more powerful than ever before.
At the forefront of many SDN researchers’ minds is security, particularly in environments that already rely heavily on virtualization. SDN will offer better control over network traffic, allowing engineers to differentiate network access for users in order to identify and separate bad actors or simply incompetent users.
“What is talked about most is security and the ability to understand or customize hosts on your LAN network,” said Mat Mathews, co-founder of Plexxi, a networking start-up
Software-Defined
Networking Goes
Well Beyond the
Data Center
betting heavily on SDN advances.
Today, those capabilities are vendor dependent. Cisco and Juniper, for example, have gone to great lengths to bake security into their networking hardware, but these so-lutions don’t necessarily integrate well in a mixed-vendor environment. Nor do these capabilities translate well if you want to manage your security through a third-party vendor that doesn’t partner with your switching provider.
That will change if open, standardized SDN catches on. TOWARD A UNIFIED SDN
SECURITY SOLUTION
Researchers are currently exploring how to use SDN to provide segmented, virtualized networks based on the characteristics of the connecting device, such as IP or MAC address. This would allow companies to give authorized us-ers full network permissions while connecting guests to a completely partitioned network that restricts their access to file shares, printers and other sensitive areas.
SDN could also help find and eliminate threats that come from within a network, whether it’s a cloud provider working to prevent malicious users or a university campus trying to stem the tide of a nasty virus. This was one of the exciting avenues of research for Ben Cherian, chief strategy officer of Midokura.
“Let’s say that a DDoS attack is originating from your [public] cloud, and you have no idea who is doing this. You can handle that by having physical people watching the
network … or you could set rules on your network, and say ‘I am going to tap all the traffic on my cloud, and if I see something abnormal, I’m going to programmatically shut down the tenants that are abnormal,’” Cherian said.
The latter option not only requires fewer staff, but it scales up more easily. It also leaves network security less prone to human error. Midokura has already developed and deployed a port mirror that clones traffic for analysis, allowing increased security without compromised speed. SDN OFFERS UNLIMITED POTENTIAL
IN NETWORK SERVICES AND APPS
As SDN advances, it will enable new applications that are unimaginable today. Instead of buying firewall or WAN optimization appliances, for example, enterprises could work with start-ups that are developing alternative SDN applications that can be installed and scaled on a virtual-ized network.
Kyle Forster, cofounder and vice president of Big Switch Networks, is building the company around that very idea. “We have 15 apps in the pipeline,” including a firewall, he said. But what’s exciting are the new capabilities SDN ap-plications will have in monitoring and redirecting network traffic in real time.
“The wonderful thing about having a programmable Level 2/Level 3 network is that if you’re a Level 4 or Level 7 application provider, you can do a small adjustment to get the right packets to [your appliance] at the right
time,” Forster said.
That’s a level of direct access that used to require pricey, specialized hardware investments. In time you could im-plement these capabilities on an SDN network quickly and inexpensively, dramatically changing the speed and flex-ibility of how networks are managed.
RETHINKING THE SPEED AND STYLE OF NETWORK ADMINISTRATION
While being able to access data streams in new and innova-tive ways could provide a wealth of new networking appli-cations, the most lasting change could be in how networks are managed—and the skills required to manage them.
“As networking gets more integrated into the virtual-ized part of IT, the software people will be running things,” said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation. “If people can write automatic scripts for configuration and dynamic management, they don’t have to get their fingers dirty with ports and VLANs and other problem areas.”
That doesn’t mean the network engineers of the future should forget everything they learned studying for the CCIE and start brushing up on their Python (yet). It could mean that they should start thinking about new services
that can be delivered and have a positive business impact. With the right frame of mind, engineers could help move the network from being a cost center to a business driver. “We like to say, ‘What can we do to make network engi-neers heroes again?’ It’s been a long time since we’ve seen that,” said Forster. “[SDN] increases their ability to grab applications when they need them to make their networks more useful.”
Plexxi’s Mathews echoed that assessment. “What has happened is that the toolkit available to sys admins to maintain, operate and orchestrate compute resources has expanded,” Mathews said. “They’ve changed their position to be more like DevOps.”
So what can forward-thinking network engineers do to prepare for the coming wave of SDN? “I would counsel them to be the advanced scout for their enterprise; show their enterprise how they can exploit SDN and do it [in] conjunction with the current installed base,” said Pitt. “Some [networking] jobs will be going away, and the people who lead the charge in how you [transition] in a productive way will be the ones the enterprise want to retain.”
Staying open-minded might not hurt, either. “I don’t think the network is going away or this role is going away, but there’s a different breed of person who needs to man-age it,” said Cherian. n
“We like to say,
‘What can we do
to make network
engineers
heroes again?’”
—Kyle Forster, cofounder and vice president of Big Switch Networks
Data Center
Network Fabrics
vs. Software-
Defined Networks
BY SHAMUS MCGILLICUDDY
Ω
Are data center fabrics and
software-defined networks
competitive or complementary
technologies?
just last year, data center network fabrics were the hot topic in networking. Flat, low-latency networks with any-to-any bandwidth promised to solve the network-ing problems of highly virtualized data centers. These fabrics would enable increased east-west traffic in—and free up bandwidth constraints created by—spanning tree protocol (STP), making networks responsive to server vir-tualization and resulting in easier-to-operate data center infrastructure.
Then something else happened—a tsunami of hype hit the networking industry in the form of OpenFlow and soft-ware defined networking (SDN). Startups emerged with claims that SDN could enable programmable networks in multivendor environments, solving many of the problems that expensive data center fabrics promised to fix, but for a whole lot less money.
Now network engineers and architects must sort through two separate hype machines. And they must ask whether data center fabrics and SDN are an either-or prop-osition, or two architectures that complement each other.
The answer to this question is hard to find, particularly because fabrics and SDNs are still very new to the market. Few enterprises have moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage with fabrics, and the availability of robust, commer-cial SDN products remains scarce.
In fact, SDN is still evolving, and the use cases for it are still developing. What’s more, every vendor has its own self-defined data center fabric offering, but most are also cooking up SDN plans.
Proponents from either camp will tell you that their side can solve most data center networking needs. However, they’ll also concede that there is room for both.
“The goals [of SDN and fabrics] sound the same, but abstracting the network to extract complexity is one thing, and then fundamentally simplifying the infrastructure is another thing. The two working together can be extremely powerful,” said Mike Marcellin, vice president of product
marketing and strategy at Juniper Networks.
“If you simply abstract the com-plexity like an SDN is trying to do, that can help. But if the fundamen-tal architecture is still complex, if it’s still brittle, if you have to keep throwing more devices at the prob-lem to scale the network, then the root of the problem is still not addressed,” Marcellin said.
Dan Pitt, executive director of
the Open Networking Foundation, which governs the de-velopment of OpenFlow, concedes Marcellin’s point to a point.
“You could choose one or the other, or you could choose a combination,” said Pitt. “But I think if a customer has a brand-new choice, a true SDN solution with its inherent benefits and with its many choices in how they procure and deploy it [that will be their choice].”
SDN IS NOT QUITE READY TO REPLACE INNOVATIVE HARDWARE
When SDN and OpenFlow hype first started taking off, some industry observers predicted that OpenFlow’s ability to centralize the control plane of a network would com-moditize network hardware. Switches and routers would become dumb boxes pushing packets back and forth, and the brains of a network would live on a server. However, re-ality has since started setting in.
“The less reasonable part of the [SDN] discussion is whether network companies are dead because young entrepreneurs can come along and buy a few parts from the silicon vendors and build stuff that is equivalent to what switch vendors do,” said Peter Christy, principal analyst with Internet Research Group. “I think that part is unrealistic because high performance, highly reliable fabric that operates on 40 Gbps links is pretty interesting engineering.”
Also, SDN remains more of a curiosity for enterprises,
Every vendor has its own
self-defined data center
fabric offering, but most are
also cooking up SDN plans.
rather than a commercialized solution that can solve prob-lems today. Google famously implemented OpenFlow on its WAN, thanks to a small army of internal engineers who have the expertise to build home-brewed Google gear. Similarly, SDN startups have helped some other Web-scale companies and cloud providers deploy software defined networks, but enterprises are a different animal.
“We’re still very early in figuring out the use case defini-tions for software defined networks,” said Michael Span-bauer, principal analyst with Current Analysis.
One of those use cases is certainly the enterprise data center, where virtualization has changed traffic patterns and added complexity. However, fabric solutions are aimed squarely at enterprise data centers with these problems, and they are shipping today.
“If I wanted to make a decision on an enterprise-class data center today at scale, I would have to go with one of the shipping fabric solutions,” Spanbauer said. “But that doesn’t mean you lock out OpenFlow as a solution down the path because all of [the fabric vendors] are active mem-bers of the [OpenFlow] working groups.”
A FIRST STEP: INTEGRATING SDN WITH FABRIC WITH LEGACY NETWORKS
Many SDN proponents point to the ability of their technol-ogy to make multivendor networks programmable from a centralized control point using OpenFlow solutions that require OpenFlow-friendly switches and routers. However,
companies like Nicira Networks, Big Switch Networks and VMware will use network tunneling protocols like VXLAN, STT and NVGRE to create a software overlay network that abstracts and virtualizes the physical network from the vir-tual servers at the access layer of the data center LAN. This capability could be helpful to enterprises that are incre-mentally adding modern data center fabrics to their infra-structure. SDN can abstract that pocket of modern fabric and the rest of the data center LAN.
“If you’re using QFabric and other vendors in your data center, software defined networking could give you an overlay to that, which would allow you to manage your QFabric but then manage other infrastructure as well,” said Juniper’s Marcellin.
ARE DATA CENTER FABRICS AND SOFTWARE DEFINED NETWORKS COMPLEMENTARY?
Using SDN as an overlay to abstract management of mul-tiple vendor footprints in your network is one thing, but SDNs and fabrics have much deeper complementary po-tential. Even in a data center where one vendor’s network fabric serves the entire data center, SDN can deliver added value.
“The most intelligent and pragmatic solutions tend to look at the problem of [data center] networking and break it into two pieces—the physical network piece and the dynamic network piece on top of that,” said Internet Re-search Group’s Christy.
The first piece—the physical network—is not trivial. “Software people don’t understand how hard it is to build a physical network that is reliable and manageable. And one of the hardest problems is [how] to use all the connecting wires on demand for whatever needs to be done at that mo-ment. That is a difficult problem, and it is the kind of thing that network vendors like Cisco, Juniper and Arista do very well,” Christy said.
“Then there is the communication between the virtual machines, which increasingly you need to deal with in the realm of software. The problem you run into with tradi-tional networking is when things become more dynamic
and when more of the operation moves into the software at a higher level.”
Big Switch Networks, an SDN and OpenFlow startup, has at least one joint customer with Juniper QFabric, according to Kyle Forster, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Big Switch. And he anticipates having many more, not just with QFabric but with data cen-ter fabrics from Cisco, Brocade and others.
“Software-defined networking gives you the functionality, and a fabric gives you the bandwidth,” Forster said. “If you want to place
any virtual machine anywhere and you need to get sub-nets and VLANs fundamentally out of the way, you need a whole lot of management functionality. Most of that, and in my opinion, all of it is in the software defined networking camp.”
A data center fabric can guarantee an enterprise equal bandwidth no matter where it chooses to place a virtual machine within a data center. As those VMs move around, the functionality of an SDN comes into play.
The joint QFabric customer, a cloud provider that caters to the healthcare industry, offers a multi-tenant environ-ment for its customers. In that environenviron-ment, it replicates a hospital’s existing data center.
Over time, the cloud provider dynamically evolves those environments, moving VMs and other resources around to reduce its own internal costs. However, as it alters its in-ternal network to support the migration of those resources throughout its data center, the cloud provider wants that network to remain transparent to its customers, Forster said.
“That means that the bandwidth guarantees had to be there [from QFabric] as [the provider] moved physical servers or virtual machines around. And he really needed to be able to place any physical server or virtual machine anywhere in the data center as he cost-reduced,” Forster said.
“He wanted to be able to do that without saying to the customer, ’Oh, hey, due to funky reasons that are more my problem than yours, I want to change your IP
A data center fabric can
guarantee an enterprise
equal bandwidth no matter
where it chooses to place a
virtual machine within a data
center. As those VMs move
around, the functionality of
addresses.’ That would be very distasteful to a customer relationship.”
“This is an extreme case of [a customer] wanting to get the network complexity out of the way and the VLANs and subnets out of the way,” Forster said. “We’re giving him all the Layer 2/Layer 3 functionality, and QFabric is giving him all the bandwidth.”
EVERY NETWORK FABRIC VENDOR IS BUILDING AN SDN STRATEGY
If you have any doubts on whether fabrics and SDNs are reconcilable, look at the fabric vendors. Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Extreme Networks, Dell Force10 and Arista
Networks are all articulating and evolving SDN visions. They are working to find points of intersections between the two categories of products.
“I can’t speak for any vendor, but I suspect that every vendor is thinking about their migration strategy [to SDN and OpenFlow],” said Pitt of the Open Networking Foun-dation. “The general notion of fabrics is a really good idea. They are proprietary solutions that seek to solve some of the same problems that we are addressing with OpenFlow and software-defined networking in general. I think some of these original [fabrics] were by necessity proprietary, but I don’t think there’s much of a need to stay proprietary for much longer since we have a standardized approach that’s now in the market.” n
Is IT Ready for the
Software-Defined
Data Center?
BY ALAN R. EARLS
Ω
Vendors are consumed with
talk about the software-defined
data center, but are IT
managers really there yet?
It used to be that a data center was a unique and recog-nizable place, marked by certain physical attributes.
Historically it has been known for its glass walls, hum-ming equipment, and special heating, vacuum and air-con-ditioning equipment. As equipment has shrunk in size and been dispersed or hidden, and as machines have become more virtualized, the old data center has begun to fade away.
Still, even with increasing levels of virtualization, many data centers remain repositories for physical infrastruc-ture that is struggling to keep pace. Technology trends such as cloud computing and even the bring your own device (BYOD) trend are putting pressure on IT departments to modernize the data center topography to create even more flexible services with better performance and security.
The software-defined data center (SDDC) may be cen-tral to that shift. The concept behind this approach is to bring every aspect of an IT environment to parity through virtualization. As a result, all infrastructure is delivered as a service and automated by software.
BANG FOR THE BUCK
The potential of an SDDC is apparent in the challenges for James Patterson, COO of Toronto, Ontario-based BPS Resolver, a software company that delivers compliance technology via Software as a Service (SaaS). But his com-pany wanted to focus on its product, not on supporting in-frastructure, so it turned to hosting company CentriLogic to provide a home for its offerings. For the most part, said Patterson, he has been thrilled with CentriLogic, which relies heavily on virtualization technology to support shift-ing customer demand. However, said Patterson, despite CentriLogic’s continued effort to improve its capabilities, when a change in network configuration is required, unlike the near-instantaneous response for server and storage changes, it takes a lot longer to implement.
The culprit, he suspects, is the fact that virtualization technology has not yet flowed into the world of switches and routers, which still depend heavily on manual and sometimes even physical reconfiguration to adapt to new demands.
That’s why there’s a growing buzz around the concept of SDDC and a key enabler, software-defined network-ing (SDN). Indeed, said Brandon Myers, an engagement manager at SWC Technology Partners, a Chicago-area IT consulting firm, “Companies are beyond ready for the software-defined data center. SDDC provides options to administrators that they have wanted for a long time but couldn’t afford.”
The term SDDC crystallizes the convergence of two core
concepts: a fully virtualized environment and the presence of cloud computing, according to Jim Damoulakis, CTO at Southborough, Mass.-based GlassHouse Technologies, a consulting and advisory firm. “The main benefit of SDDC from a private cloud standpoint is its ability to deliver bet-ter efficiency, flexibility and agility,” he said.
Damoulakis said that while server virtualization has cre-ated a revolution—dramatically reducing server provision-ing times from weeks to hours, for example—the picture for storage, and especially for networking, has been less favorable. The net result has been to reduce overall infra-structure flexibility. The vision that SDDC represents has been to “wrap” the entire environment with automation by adding a layer of management. As a result, changes become repeatable, low effort and consistent, he said.
Damoulakis said the term software-defined data center appears to have originated with VMware Inc., the virtual-ization company. “They are a software firm, and software firms tend to view things in software terms,” he said. “I would prefer software-enabled, because software is the tool set and what you should be doing is focusing on solving a business problem, not simply imposing a software vision on things.”
EMERGING CAPABILITIES
Eric Hanselman, research director for networking at 451 Research in Boston, agrees that the SDDC is about improv-ing integration as well as about automation. The goal is
to take activities that often involve physical changes and manual processes and integrate them with other, more au-tomated data center practices, he said. The starting point is virtualization. “You have to have a certain amount of ab-straction to deal more flexibly with the various resources,” said Hanselman, “but the real value is achieving a higher level of management integration. It doesn’t have to be cloud initially, but it is going to look like cloud.”
SDDC’s prime goal is to make it easier to change server, storage and, in particular, network configurations. It does so, he explained, by automating partitioning of the entire data center infrastructure and spanning that architecture, and by scaling and thus delivering much greater efficiency.
At the moment, it is still early days for SDDC adoption, Hanselman said. So far, it has been mostly the kinds of or-ganizations that are building hyperscale data centers that have had to pioneer and blaze a path. “There have been
some widely discussed implementa-tions, particularly Google,” he said. Google has done interesting things to dynamically shift internal capac-ity using homegrown applications and their own OpenFlow control switches, he said. That has been fur-ther supplemented by having a dy-namic scheduling system that shifts capacity as systems perform more traffic-intensive activities such as replication.
In SDDC there are currently two major players, accord-ing to Hanselman: Nicira, with its Network Virtualization Platform (NVP)—which enables the dynamic creation of virtual network infrastructure and services that are com-pletely decoupled from the physical network hardware— and Big Switch Networks, which offers what it calls Open Software-Defined Networking. Hanselman said both com-panies aim to use virtual connections across virtualized environments and then extend reach through tunnels into other virtualized environments.
But other companies have or are developing capabilities in these areas. Brocade, for example, offers the ability to take a tunnel that starts in a virtual world and terminate it in a physical device.
Hanselman said SDDC can boost data center efficiency. “With virtualization, we improved the efficiency of indi-vidual servers. SDDC starts with the same situation for the data center,” he said. “Where in the past you had to dedi-cate a server for a database or other application, now you can divide resources as needed.”
“We have moved from an architecture where, because of the network, you had to build pods or tiers; now SDDC permits tasks to move around,” said Hanselman. Further-more, in the past, a data center was limited in its ability to move applications that needed high performance because of the limits of the Fibre Channel connections. With SDDC, the SAN is connected to a network environment that can abstract the connection to wherever the server is used, as needed, using iSCSI or Fibre Channel over IP.
SDDC’s prime goal is
to make it easier to
change server, storage
and, in particular,
network configurations.
“To make this work, especially for storage, you need high performance; what SDDC does is take advantage of soft-ware networking capabilities to … ensure it has the neces-sary performance,” said Hanselman.
Efficiency will be particularly appealing to some, said Nick Lippis, publisher of The Lippis Report, which targets IT and network decision makers. He said that SDDC has evolved in part as a result of the pressure on virtualization companies to have more highly integrated stacks and for those stacks to have automated provisioning attributes. “We have distributed computing with centralized automa-tion and one-person management, but in networking we still have operational bloat,” he said. “The end users don’t want to have to keep adding people as the networks grow.” Up until now, said Lippis, networking has been an oli-gopoly, with relatively few players and with ease of man-agement as an afterthought. Lippis compared SDDC to
the “revolution” in home entertain-ment, when the universal remote started to allow easy control of mul-tiple devices from one point—sim-plifying both configuration and use. “Once you have everything wired and you have centralized control abstraction, then you can start do-ing interestdo-ing thdo-ings to control a network,” Lippis said.
In the SDDC vision, everything is wired once, then network agents
can manage devices and protocols. “Hopefully at some point in time we will see applications simply requesting services from the network, but clearly we are not there yet,” said Lippis.
He noted that a lot of activity is happening relative to SDDC in the Open Networking Foundation, which is devel-oping standards for open networking and software-defined networks.
Lippis helps host an open-networking user group. “We have support from large companies like Fidelity and JPM-organ Chase & Co. All those firms are involved because they have a problem,” he said. “In the IT networking world, there is a ratio of about one engineer for every 50 rout-ers, whereas in the mobile market, companies like Sprint have one engineer managing thousands of endpoints. That is why these companies are making such a big push for SDDC.”
Further, said Lippis, “The larger IT buyers are starting to meet with startups in this space; they don’t really want the large network vendors there because they don’t believe they have an interest in making this technology happen.”
The advantages of SDDC aren’t just hype, said Arun Taneja, founder and analyst at the Taneja Group. Auto-mation means you can set and achieve quality-of-service targets and really treat the whole physical infrastructure as a pool, he explained. “A lot of the physical structure may still look familiar, but with SDDC you will have the ability for applications to find the connectivity they need at the performance level they require, without having armies of
In the SDDC vision, everything
is wired once, then network
agents can manage
devices and protocols.
people to manage the process,” he said.
“In the age of the cloud,” said Taneja, “there is no way humans can manage the thousands of elements in the infrastructure.”
Conceptually, he said, unlike traditional deterministic networks, where humans define the pathways, SDN and SDDC, like the Internet, rely on heuristic approaches to find optimal paths.
“What we have learned about virtualization so far is that solving two parts of the problem—computing and storage— just shifts the bottleneck somewhere else, namely to the network,” said Taneja.
CAUTIONS AND ADVICE
A missing piece in most discussions of SDDC is the busi-ness process and policy definition aspect, said Damoulakis. “The technology breakthroughs are important, but you need to have a plan in place to use the technology in an
effective way,” he said. “Otherwise you are getting a tool set, but you don’t know what you are building. IT is often guilty of overprovisioning—building just in case instead of just in time.”
Damoulakis said although SDDC clearly offers advan-tages, there are complexities and pitfalls, especially related to vendor selection. “This falls straight in line with the movement toward the private cloud,” he said, “but you still have to look at how some of the components have been defined and, in some cases, maybe wait for clarity and a clearer sense of direction.”
A starting point for investment decisions is reviewing your existing technology. A legacy application running in a traditional data center model, for example, may not be a good candidate for SDDC. However, there is a clear use case for SDDC with “higher-volume and standardizable services that IT is regularly called upon to deploy,” Damoulakis said. “Those could be better handled in a fast and efficient way through SDDC.” n
MICHAEL MORISYis the news producer for the Boston Globe/
Boston.com covering the technology and startup landscape. Previously, Morisy covered the enterprise networking space in editorial roles at TechTarget.
SHAMUS MCGILLICUDDY is the director of news and features for TechTarget Networking Media.
ALAN R. EARLS is a Boston-area freelance writer focused on business and technology.
The New Network
is a Networking Media Group e-publication.
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