SDN's Life and Future: 10 Trends in 10

Wen/Shanyi Air

Marketing Director, Spruce Network

The "Global SDNFV Technology conference", which ended June 2, 2016, brings together global authority organizations, operators, manufacturers and enterprises, focusing on carrier networks, enterprise networks, and cloud data centers. From keynote speeches, user exchanges and product testing, there is a message: "SDN is no longer a concept, and the urgent need and the land of the industry have come true." Sdn goes hand in hand with full flowering and commercial landing, and software definitions will enter the Golden age. "

1. SDN accelerates commercialization, ideal in reality

Relying on the Sdn,it team to provide a plug-and-play, flexible network architecture for the business team from the endless operations iteration, the business team will also be able to make great strides in pursuing business innovation. At present, almost all the major operators, data center service providers and internet companies in the world are exploring and practicing SDN, and continue to improve and enhance it. Relevant international Organizations (Linux Foundation, ONF, ODL and Onos, etc.) are also strengthening the relevant standards and industrialization promotion. SDN has entered a critical period of rapid business model deployment and is about to usher in a golden age. 2. SDN and NFV converge

As the "brother" of Sdn, NFV focuses on the 4~7 layer of the network, including routers, firewalls, load balancing, IPS, and application gateways. SDN and NFV are not interdependent, but complement each other, the convergence of the two is the best practice of Network Service delivery: The network of proprietary devices to the common hardware and software replacement, the implementation of functional virtualization, separation of the control plane from the hardware to a common server or virtual machine hosting, the implementation of software definition and unified orchestration. In the future, SDN and NFV solutions will be tightly integrated to create greater value.

3. open-o:focused on orchestrating SDN&NFV

February 23, 2016, the Linux Foundation announced the establishment of the Oepn-o (Open-orchestrator) project at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, to develop the industry's first open source software framework and orchestration to facilitate the integration of various SDN/NFV technologies, Achieve flexible SDN/NFV functionality. The SDN orchestration will play a key role in the SDN commercial landing, targeting SDN/NFV delivery and interoperability. Brocade, China Mobile, China Telecom and Red Hat are among the first to support the Open-o project.

4. SDN applications: Application as King

According to the Gartner release of the Hype Cycle for Data Center Networking, Virtual Switch has matured and has been widely used in virtualized environments hosted by x86 servers. NFV and software-defined Networks (software defined networks) are maturing.

What the next trend is. The answers include SDN applications, Sd-wan. On an increasingly mature SDN infrastructure, innovation hotspots are in SDN applications, including service orchestration, network monitoring, and network Diagnostics. Looking at the data Center Network transformation, the controller is the foundation, the application will be the enterprise attention core. 5. Sd-wan: Software-defined DCI

It teams in large and medium-sized enterprises face at least 3 challenges: one is to improve the quality of the multi-datacenter internetwork to ensure backup disaster or cross-global application performance, and second, to effectively manage highly complex branch deployments, and to migrate the static and private features of traditional WANs into dynamic and public cloud environments. Sd-wan network Services from the lower-level WAN hardware decoupling and flexible control to help users reduce WAN bandwidth expenditure, improve management convenience and delivery efficiency, Sd-wan represents the development trend of WAN. 6. Behind the 5G, SDN will be the key

Although the 5G standard has not yet been determined, the industry has made some hard targets for 5G, with breakthroughs in performance, reliability, flexibility, and scalability. For example, 5G compared to 4G, mobile data traffic will increase by 1000 times times, user data rate will increase 10 to 100 times times, peak transmission rate of 10Gbps, end-to-end delay will be reduced 5 times times, the target low to 10ms, some special scenes even as low as 1ms, there will be a large amount of communications and tens of billions of devices to access the scene. All of this requires high-performance networks, flexible services, and resilient network architectures. SDN will be one of the key technologies that drive the evolution of the 5G network architecture toward a distributed and intelligent direction.

7. Industry Cloud, leveraging SDN to break through bottlenecks

Industry clouds, such as financial cloud, broadcast cloud, and government cloud, that are built by the solution providers in the vertical domain, often encounter network bottlenecks when expanding into large-scale production environments, including network performance, network security, and network operations. Therefore, the multi-tenant service capability is the first design standard of the industry cloud, and the second design standard is decoupling to achieve future development; The third design standard is the flexibility and extensibility of the network architecture, including scale scalability, scalable functionality, vendor branding, and device scalability. SDN can reduce the reliance of the business on equipment or equipment vendors and enable the industry cloud to be autonomous and controllable. 8. Securing the Cloud with SDN: Armed with SDN

In the era of cloud computing, network visibility and security defenses have become more challenging because the traditional sense of security boundaries has disappeared. The cloud security is a major trend in the security market, where dedicated hardware is not enough to meet today's dynamic demands and requires a secure model based on virtualization and cloud computing. Mainstream security vendors will roll out cloud security to deliver virtually all of the security features in software, so how to effectively orchestrate and schedule security services and integrate them into cloud management. SDN provides a flexible traffic scheduling mechanism and distributed network architecture, and SDN-based cloud security (distributed firewalls, secure resource pools, and differential segments) will be the future of cloud security. 9. Network visualization: Through the phenomenon to see the essence of

Traditional data center network, the problem is hidden in the network, rely on switches, network diagnostic tools can solve most problems. However, the network in the cloud environment exists multi-tenant and multi-service, large-volume resource sharing, virtual and physical network interleaving, and traffic spikes and network dynamic changes, such as the situation, network monitoring and operation and maintenance means insufficient, lagging far behind the development of cloud computing services, visualization as the basis of network monitoring and operation to ensure the stability of the cloud business.

The essence of network visualization is traffic visualization, on this basis can realize traffic scheduling, traffic load balancing and traffic analysis functions, to help data center and cloud managers to achieve business security and management visualization. CORD: Implementing On-demand Network Services

CORD (the central Office re-architected as Data Center) is a onos-led project. Using commercial chips, white-box devices, and standard branching-backbone fiber to form an open network architecture that leverages Onos, Xos, and OpenStack to form an open-source platform, Cord delivers the economy and cloud agility of telecom services.

AT/T in 2015, it moved 5% of its business to the cord architecture, with a 2016-year plan to migrate 30%, with the ultimate goal of transforming itself into a software company. Enterprise CORD (E-cord) cut into the specific business scenarios, realize the enterprises-bearer network-idc/cloud end-to-end collaboration, access to China Unicom and the attention of large enterprises. Mobile CORD (M-cord) is used in the cellular architecture to quickly respond to the real-time needs of mobile users, with support from T and Verizon.

Just as computational virtualization has brought transformation and innovation to the industry, the emergence and development of SDN, with the vision of "It's time to virtualize the network", today, "It's time to made use of SDN".

(This article reproduced from the Spruce Network Http://www.2cloud.com/blog/2016/06/12/sdn's life and the future-10 years of development to see ten trends, the article after the "Huawei Technology" editor)

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