Tame your WAN: Apply SDN to the WAN and wansdn

Tame your WAN: Apply SDN to the WAN and wansdn

The network should have responded to the needs of users and applications. However, for a long time, the network does not meet our needs well, and the network forces users and applications to adapt to network restrictions. In enterprises, the IT department has been striving to ensure that the network security capability is consistent with the development of devices and applications. In the WAN, bandwidth costs and restrictions force users to accept lower network performance than the LAN.

All these situations have changed due to the rise of cloud computing. Cloud computing provides users with instant and responsive networks that can be experienced on any device. To achieve this goal, cloud applications running in the data center require the network of the data center to adapt to and meet the huge demand of cloud computing for flexibility, scalability and agility.

SDN was born in the data center and is a response to cloud computing running on software-defined virtual servers. Cloud computing is a new architecture that can meet users' needs at any time. to match these changes, the data center network must be equally flexible, agile, and scalable.

It must be automatic. As users demand resources, cloud computing can create virtual machines in a very short period of time. The network must respond quickly and match with it. Configure your own resources to process the required routes to meet the connection requirements. To ensure that all of this can run without human intervention, cloud and network must be able to use the same technology.

When IT shows users, applications, and requirements, the network team awards the virtual LAN (VLAN), subnet, switch, and router status. If the IT department wants to see policy, rights, and compliance issues, the network team should maintain access control, firewall rules, service level and SLA visibility. SDN faces the challenge of using software to automate and abstract networks.

The results were dramatic and brought about a brand new network model. SDN controllers are directly bound to the server software's workload policies, which instantiate the required network connections and policies. Compliance problems disappear and are easily verified as these are incorporated into the policy. Moreover, the network structure or underlying network is greatly simplified because the connection policies are implemented by software. This allows network expansion to better meet the performance requirements of cloud computing. The abstraction provided by the SDN layer separates the network structure from the application policy and enables them to expand more independently.

With the construction of cloud computing in 5G network standards, the rise of IOT, and the popularization of automation, the cloud is evolving beyond the data center and gradually spreading to the edge of the WAN. Network functions previously run on dedicated hardware and applications are now distributed across data centers and edge clouds.

We need to automate connections and policies for these new workloads within the data center and on the WAN. However, Wan is a wild beast. Because the edge cloud workload needs to be bound to the underlying transmission network, we cannot simply extend the data center SDN to the WAN.

WAN is a set of established and complex global network infrastructure. The layers of optical fibers, gateways, routers and switches, as well as operating systems and business systems make the WAN reliability up to 99.999%, however, IT is a more ambitious goal to give IT applications a response and constructive interaction with the WAN in the flexible cloud era.

Fortunately, because SDN and virtualization can build networks more effectively, WAN operators have begun to accept SDN and virtualization principles. However, there is still a long way to achieve a fully automated, software-defined, and policy-driven network. Similar to data center SDN and wan sdn, cloud smoke is used to abstract complex network devices and topologies, automate Device Configuration and optimize network resources.

There have been many cases of using routers or switches with SDN and wan sdn functions as converters or gateways, but they have spent a lot of energy on integration, eventually became a specific solution of the vendor. They also tend to provide limited visibility into end-to-end network services and rely on protocols such as RSVP, which are not designed for fine-grained network resource control.

What the industry needs is an open and scalable way to abstract the wide area networks of multiple vendors, provide fine-grained control over end-to-end network services, and seamlessly connect to the data center without complex gateways.

At present, there are already many innovative technologies to fill in some of the difficulties of the route and open object model, and there is no need for sustained investment. We have used the local language of the application workload to automate the LAN of the data center, and now the WAN is more programmable.