Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV) market is forecast to grow at 86 per cent CAGR from $2 billion in 2015 to $45 billion in 2020. North America is expected to lead the market, whereas Asia-Pacific including Japan is the fastest-growing market and is expected to soon replace Europe to become the second-biggest contributor. We are also seeing some movement in the Indian market in almost all the industry verticals – telecom, IT, cloud services providers and e-commerce providers.
Industry stalwarts like Vishal Barapatre, Group CTO, In2IT Technologies; Swapna Bapat, Director, Systems Engineering, Brocade India; Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions South-East Asia & India, Verizon Enterprise Solutions; Sajan Paul, Director, Systems Engineering – India & SAARC, Juniper Networks; C. Ramanan, Director – Cloud Networking, India Subcontinent, Citrix; and Amandeep Singh, Country Manager, Dell Networking, debate on how SDN will replace traditional networking.
Will SDN replace traditional networking? Social media, mobile devices and cloud computing are pushing traditional networks to their limits. Software-defined network can successfully alleviate a lot of that pressure.
Vishal Barapatre: SDN is a key to generate effective and flexible networking solutions which is efficient in resource and data traffic management. SDN will surely bring a revolution in the network management behaviour of the enterprises and would subsequently drive the market growth by ensuring ease in network management and raising industry standards.
Swapna Bapat: India is at a critical juncture where organizations now need to move forward and start adopting innovations like SDN to be able to adapt to the rapidly-changing business environment which is not possible with traditional networking. As the focus of enterprises is shifting towards IoT, SDN implementations are sure to mushroom in a slow yet steady manner. In a digital era where new business models are challenging and disrupting industries rapidly, SDN as a technology will be in demand as Indian enterprises seek to quickly launch new services backed by technology where traditional network would take months to deploy.
Prashant Gupta: The software-defined services will not replace traditional services. It would rather make the network services more efficient with the underlying infrastructure. Considering the coexistence network technologies, enterprises will need to supervise both SDN and legacy networking environments.
Sajan Paul: We will see new companies successfully emerge, while some incumbents unsuccessfully struggle to transition. But like any major industry trend, customer’s benefit is real and we have now reached a tipping point where the technology shift is inevitable.
C. Ramanan: In the future, technologies like switching, routing, firewall will exist, but the control will preferably go to software. There is a possibility of SDN replacing traditional networking, the reason being that customers today look for alternatives. As a part of the whole automation piece, networking technologies will get integrated with the whole infrastructure piece (which is nothing but storage, server, software) and will be controlled through software. Many of the vendors offering networking products earlier are slowly moving to the SDN domain.
Amandeep Singh: The shift towards SDN in the data center represents the most transformative architectural trend delivering enhanced network agility, choice and optimized network operations for customers. Open networking contributes to the significant disruption occurring within the industry to more easily and efficiently deploy, monitor and adjust network services and performance.
Will open-source software improve efficiency?
Vishal Barapatre: Open-source software has emerged as an effective way to bring flexibility, improve efficiency and cut down costs on IT spends. In2IT Technologies’ Business Model has always been a digital one as technology is the key to adopt rapid changes required in the business world. Open-source platforms are not only bringing cost down, but it also helping organizations to adopt the new technology at a faster pace.
Swapna Bapat: By employing the open architecture philosophy, the end-user has the freedom to choose the products that best meet their specific needs and remain confident that together they will perform as intended. Open source enables technology agility, typically offering multiple ways to solve problems. Open source helps keep IT organizations from getting blocked because a particular capability is not available from a vendor. With open source, one can start small and quickly with community versions, and then migrate to a commercially-supported solution as the business requirements drive there.
Prashant Gupta: The open-source software platform makes it easier for enterprises to collect the business intelligence generated and integrate it with the big data/analytics capabilities necessary to drive true business insight.
Sajan Paul: In my conversation with CIOs across various verticals, it is very evident that there is an urgency to build a software-centric IT strategy. This really intersects the technology horizon built up with SDN as the foundation for networks.
C. Ramanan: When we talk about SDN today, it has more to do with consolidation. There have been different phases through which the industry has been going. Earlier, it was physical servers, then it moved to hypervisors and then server consolidation started happening, followed by storage consolidation and now at this time, we can see network consolidation taking place. So definitely software plays a very critical role.
There is also a very thin line between software-defined data center (SDDC) and software- defined networking. Conceptually, SDN is nothing but to have a complete control or manageability of any of the products available (like switching, routing) at the software level.
How are your SDN solutions different from your competitors?
Swapna Bapat: The biggest differentiation for us is that we have an open architecture that is built around open standards that allows our customers to do best-of-breed solutions, and the fact [that] we have relationships across the spectrum. One way we are demonstrating that is through our work with OpenDaylight for the Brocade SDN Controller. OpenDaylight is a Linux Foundation Project that unites industry leaders in developing an open SDN platform in a vendor-neutral environment.
Sajan Paul: Juniper offers a comprehensive array of solutions. The core SDN principles can be applied to all networking and networking services, including security. The technology can be utilized from the data center and enterprise to the mobile and wireless networks used by service providers. So the scope is immense.
The SDN solutions provided by Juniper do not rely on extensive hardware-centric network upgrades. Using software, Juniper is able to offer solutions which are capable of adding value to the overall hardware portfolio. Juniper’s Contrail – an open-source and open-stack distribution code - enables users to download the entire SDN asset from our website and use it for free. Our close alliance with VMware is one of our biggest value propositions in this space. However, our strategy for SDN keeps in mind long-term goals and it is in this regard that we have started rolling out aspects of our portfolio to support our customers’ SDN journey.
Amardeep Singh: Our SDN strategy is to extend choice to customers. We offer a multi-prolonged SDN approach to our solutions by way of Hypervisor-based agnostic solutions for network virtualization and network function virtualization; Controller-based Open Flow solutions is based on open standards and open-source innovations; and programmatic management: legacy programmability using standard management interfaces and scripting languages.
The flexibility provided by SDN makes it critical for enterprise users to opt for it and globally social media organization, new-age companies and telecom service providers. Indian companies should start looking at SDN opportunities in all these sectors.
Pravin Prashant with inputs from Samrita baruha
