IDC predicts the SDN global market to be around $3.7 billion by 2016 from a $360 million at present. While globally it has created quite a hype, it being in its maturity stage has not been able to create the wonders yet in India. Will its uptake rise with time?
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) used to be a relatively new term a year back. The adoption rate is still not the highest but is believed to soon attract the attention of customers who are looking for scalable data centers and mobility. In terms of the market size in India, Gartner states that server, storage and networking market amounts to approximately INR5,300 crore, out of which at least 5–10 per cent must be SDN-centric decisions.
“Market adoption, including in India, is at a very early stage, so it’s difficult to estimate. Operators in India are particularly concerned with architecting their networks for advanced mobile backhaul and I believe that SDN will help lay the foundation for more high-performance backhaul networks in India,” replies Ryan Perera, Country Head, Ciena.
Sajan Paul, Director – Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, observes that the Indian business today is now accepting SDN as a serious investment decision. "We have done a number of sessions for the CIOs and teams. The feedback we received showed that it is a great technology but people preferred to wait and watch. This approach has changed over time and we are seeing some real deployments happening now.”
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| Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solutions – India and SAARC, EMC |
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| Tarun Kaura, Director – Technology Sales, India, Symantec |
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| Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP Networking, HP India |
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| Ryan Perera, Country Head, Ciena. |
Subhasish Gupta, Country Manager – India & SAARC, Allied Telesis, however, feels that, across the market as a whole, the uptake of SDN is quite low as it is a technology that is primarily relevant to the service provider and data center markets today. “The primary reason for this is that there are compelling reasons to deploy SDN in carrier and data center environments that don’t exist in the enterprise today. Technology managers in the enterprise are grappling with challenges around resourcing and network management that are unlikely to be overcome by SDN,” he says.
However, it is important here to note that SDN is not a product but rather an emerging architecture driven towards a dynamic, ultra-manageable, adaptable and, more importantly, an “open” networking platform. “The industry realizes that there are two important technologies that go hand in hand, namely SDN and NFV (Network Function Virtualization). Customers today are ensuring that their newer infrastructure purchases are all SDN-ready,” explains Edgar Dias, Regional Director, India, Brocade.
Nevertheless, vendors are optimistic about the future and growth potentials of software-controlled infrastructure in India. “No segment is feeling the impact more than the telecommunications industry, which is one of the core markets for SDN solutions. Hence, we see great potential in this area. India is amongst the top ‘mobile’ population and there is large part untapped – rural telecom. The carriers and NEMS along with the government are looking to expand in this space and this is where we see the unique opportunity. Practically, India will be positioned amongst ‘early majority’ if not ‘early adopters’,” says Murali Ramalingam, Country Manager & Senior Director – Sales, Ixia.
“With changing business dynamics, customers today are looking at data centers to be more agile to give the right resources to the right users, in the right way. This led to the phenomena of Software defined everything – of which Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables an organization’s network to be more elastic, agile, and dynamic, allowing them to keep pace with rapidly-changing consumer demands,” explains Tarun Kaura, Director – Technology Sales, India, Symantec.
But SDN is here to stay...
Notwithstanding this fact, Software-Defined Networking is set to grab a humongous share of the networking budget. With IDC predicting a global market of $2 billion for SDN-ready products by 2016, it is a trend which enterprise channels cannot miss even in India. SDN has seen a growing adoption from enterprises and mid-market customers as they rapidly move to the cloud to better suit their business needs. Companies will successfully emerge and struggle to transition to this new shift. But like any major industry trend, the customer benefit is real in SDN and companies now have reached a tipping point where the technology shift is inevitable.
However, adoption of these technologies within the enterprise is being driven by differing use cases and application workloads as well as maturity in their journey to the cloud. Agrees Abhijit Potnis, Director Technology Solutions – India and SAARC, EMC, "Indian businesses are accepting SDN as a serious investment option. There has been an increased reception of and execution of several projects in SDN for enterprise and mid-market customers with branches or those focussing on BYOD. At the same time, Software-Defined Storage (SDS) and Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) are gaining traction with increasing inquiries coming in from customers focussing on scalable data centers and mobility. The Indian market is enthusiastic about the technology and we expect the businesses to grow manifold, especially after the foreign direct investment (FDI) limit became 49 per cent, as per the Union Budget announcement.”
“SDN, today, is similar to ‘cloud’ a few years ago. It is a new technology that means different things to different people, and while there are a small number of unique applications for the technology – particularly in the service provider and data center markets – it is still lacking the driver that will compel organizations to deploy SDN. While it is still early days for SDN as a technology, over the nex
t 12 to 24 months we expect to see some interesting applications for SDN in the enterprise that will deliver the compelling argument for deploying SDN that many enterprises are looking for,” says Subhasish.
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| Edgar Dias, Regional Director, India, Brocade |
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| Sajan Paul, Director – Systems Engineering, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks |
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| Murali Ramalingam, Country Manager & Senior Director – Sales, Ixia |
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| Anuj Goel, Pre-Sales Consultant, IP Division, Alcatel-Lucent, India |
According to Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager, HP Networking, HP India, SDN finds extensive applications across verticals like Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Healthcare, Education, Government and Energy, as it extends the power of networking programing to give the application the ultimate control needed to meet the demands of business. "Besides, SDN can be deployed for video and collaboration applications, converged storage and mobile network service orchestration," he says.
“SDN is a game-changing technology which is here to stay. It is just a matter of time before we will witness more organizations deploying SDN. In India, numerous organizations are toying with SDN architectures while the interest in deployment of NFV technologies like Vyatta continues manifold,” adds Edgar.
Asserts Anuj Goel, Pre-Sales Consultant, IP Division, Alcatel-Lucent, India, "There is lot of hype about SDN but the Software-defined networking (SDN) must be magic. Why else would researchers, educators, vendors, customers -- practically everyone and anyone connected to the networking industry -- be so high on SDN? The answer, of course, lies in the promise of SDN. After all, isn't it supposed to completely transform networking? Isn't it the innovation that has finally rescued the networking industry after a decade-long drought? And, most importantly, isn't the SDN market forecast to generate tens of billions of dollars -- an estimate being raised every month. The technology is definitely here to stay."
As per Alcatel-Lucent, SDN adoption will be seen happening in next few years in Datacenter Networks, Wide Area VPN Services using SD-VPNs.
The excitement around SDNs is being fuelled in large parts over the shortcomings of today’s legacy networks and pent-up demand for more innovation in the network. Today’s legacy networks are too complex to run cost-efficiently, too closed to foster innovation and too brittle to respond to the needs of the business. Equally important, legacy networks remain blind to the dynamic needs of the applications that run on top of them.
If IT managers are ready to jump aboard the SDN bandwagon, they might wonder where to begin. The answer is virtualization.
However, SDN is different from virtualization. While SDN is an emerging architecture that enables network operators to more effectively monetize and manage their networks through programmability, logically centralized control, and abstraction, Virtualization is a tool for logically partitioning physical resources to achieve multi-tenancy and optimized utilization.
In the context of SDN, there are two distinct concepts: Network Virtualization and Network Functions Virtualization. Network Virtualization is used to abstract the details of the underlying physical network from applications and users requesting network services. Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is an initiative to virtualize and consolidate network software that is currently running in dedicated hardware to simplify deployment/management, and accelerate time to new services. Both are integral elements of Carrier SDN architectures. NFV is a key part of a service provider’s broader SDN strategy. Both NFV and SDN are often seen as highly complementary and it is in combination that they deliver the most value. NFV allows for the deployment of network components as software via virtual machines. Virtualizing network functions is the first step towards building an agile network and truly leveraging SDN.
“In my opinion, SDN and NFV are here to stay. These technologies extend programmability further into the network, creating what we refer to as application-aware networks. In fact, Ciena recently introduced its Agility portfolio of open SDN and NFV software. The Agility software portfolio is built using the OpenDaylight framework which gives network operators the ability to leverage a mix of open-source, self-developed and vendor components from a broad ecosystem and helps them avoid being locked in to a single vendor,” says Ryan.
“As enterprises mature beyond basic virtualization and look towards private cloud deployments, SDN deployments will be a must-have as it simplifies operations by automating and centralizing network management tasks,” points out Abhijit.
"SDN is enabling opportunities that develop new applications which shape how the network functions are secured for end user or mission critical business applications. Along this are the opportunities for network integrators and system integrators to put together complex networks that are becoming platforms for next-gen enterprise applications," recommends Prakash.
SDN and the channel ecosystem…
In the backdrop of changing IT landscape, companies wish to equip their partners with the latest opportunities. In terms of an SDN-enabled world, the skill sets associated with operating in are fundamentally different than today. Having viewed this as a challenge, vendors adopt approaches that will enable its channel partners to use SDN to their advantage in taking products to customers that will work in an SDN world. Also, the channel needs to understand this technology and explain the benefits to their customers. Partners also need to make investments themselves in the way they do business on the software side of things.
Allied Telesis has designed a new Business Partner Programme (BPP) to address the key technology trends driving the IT industry. The BPP provides business partners with options, support and resources to continue to succeed in the current marketplace while also adapting to and thriving in this next generation of IT.
Under the BPP programme, partners look for three key attributes, namely Choice and flexibility to match their engagement in the programme with their evolving go-to-market strategies; Solutions (not just products) and services opportunities embedded within the programme t
o make it easier to grow their businesses and Access to next-generation IT (Third Platform) through the EMC federation of businesses.
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Subhasish Gupta,
Country Manager – India & SAARC, Allied Telesis
Juniper, on its part, has cultivated a comprehensive ecosystem of technology, system integrator and channel partnership programmes to help customers evolve to SDN pragmatically and confidently. These partners cover a wide range of spectrum spanning all SDN planes, including Automation tools, SDN Control plane, Orchestration frameworks, Infrastructure analysis and business intelligence, Hypervisor, storage & computing management, Layer 4 through 7 services integration and Cloud management.
SDN is also transforming the partner business model to be a software business model. This is a transformative way to how networks are sold, and there is a lot of learning to do, but it is also a huge opportunity to grow their business.
“For the channel, the opportunity really exists in understanding the needs of your customers, aligning yourself with one or two vendors that are best suited to meet those needs and then developing a programme that sees vendor and partner working hand in hand to establish a leading presence within those key verticals or customer markets,” explains Subhasish.
“Generally, most of partners are system integrators, who roll services based on the equipment they sell. But they will raise a step ahead in the value chain with open software which will help them in providing custom applications as per customer needs. Also, they will be able to integrate solutions to the custom applications of the customers,” observes Edgar.
“SDN has the potential to disrupt traditional reseller models as more of the networking value shifts to software and services. We understand this and understand that our partners will need help in being educated on both SDN and NFV and its business impact. Our own partner programmes will evolve as well to better recognize and value those partners that successfully transition to more software and services capabilities,” remarks Ryan Perera.
Deployment models for SDN…
Today, service providers and data centers are the primary places where SDN is found to be deployed. The data center space is leading the adoption efforts by moving very quickly with network virtualization and the early stages of SDN implementation. Adoption is also occurring with carriers and smaller content service providers, and beginning in the enterprise.
Beyond the data center, Ryan Perera of Ciena believes service providers will initially apply SDN practices in the following scenarios and can provide a level-set regarding progress in these areas –
• The cloud backbone – connecting provider data centers together
• Tier-2 service providers looking to provide dynamic metro and regional networks, for NaaS and to connect enterprise data centers to partner cloud providers
• The wireless backhaul network
Subhasish indicates that he expects to see hybrid SDN where some ports within a switch can behave in a traditional switching fashion and other ports that can be configured for SDN to be the initial step to bridging the gap between traditional and SDN enabled networks. “We also expect that as enterprise organizations analyze their needs, we will see a rise of alternate technologies that meet those needs that organizations identify – and this may not be SDN,” he says.
“SDN will be relevant to any place where we have built a network. There are too many use cases for data center such as Network Virtualization, Campus and Service Providers where SDN can be deployed,” says Edgar. According to him, there are three primary deployment models for SDN –
• Switch: A switch-based model will be applicable for greenfield deployments where the cost of physical infrastructure and multi-vendor options are paramount. But the limitation is it does not use existing L2/3 network equipment.
• Overlay: In cases where the server virtualization team is assigned the responsibility of SDN environment or when over an existing IP network rapid deployment is made, tunneling approach is used. This approach does not address the problems of managing the underlying infrastructure and thus repairing is a complex affair as it does not support bare metal hosts.
• Hybrid: It is a combination of both switch and overlay which allows migrating existing equipment to a new switch-based model.
While many enterprises have indicated that they are considering deploying SDN, many or most of these organizations are still looking at what benefits SDN will deliver. But the truth is that it is difficult to make a compelling business case for the deployment of SDN in the enterprise today.
However Abhijit analyzes this in a different way. “SDN has a very compelling value proposition for service provider companies, who are in constant need to re-architect their offerings. As customers start developing third platform applications in their environments, service providers will need to build innovative ways of helping them deploy such applications in Hybrid Cloud environments. And SDN (or SDDC) makes such hybrid cloud deployments much faster than traditional application deployment models,” he opines.
The future looks bright…
As many point out, SDN is going to be the “Future”. SDN is being driven by the increasing use of cloud and virtualization technologies, which, along with other factors, have resulted in changing traffic patterns and other needs which traditional networking infrastructure is less suited to deal with. Vendors are optimistic about the future of SDN technology and continue to use cases across industries to aware customers. The CIOs and CTOs are beginning to have SDN on top of their agenda to make IT infrastructure more agile, amongst other things. The “hype”, according to many, is a definitive approach towards the next level of computing and there will be a paradigm shift in how networking is done and machines collaborate. “More businesses are moving on cloud than ever, and there is a pressure on data centers to hold and run applications. Some of these applications are accessed on demand, whereas some of them are custom applications catering to very specific or proprietary business needs. When you have so much of complexity in the networks the need for programmable networks arise, hence SDN,” Ramalingam puts it in a simple way.
samrita@varindia.com
