BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENABLE THE CHANGING FACE OF IT

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What Does Radical Network Change Really Look Like?

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When Cloud-Based UC Business Makes Sense

kWHEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE CLOUDS

COLLIDEHybrid cloud blurs the lines

of responsibility.

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EDITOR’S DESK | RIVKA GEWIRTZ LITTLE

What Does Radical Network Change Really Look Like?

Technology transitions are not black-or-white, all-or-nothing. Never has that been clearer than in networking, where a number of complicated radical shifts are occurring simultaneously.

Network change is imminent. All at once we are moving from IPv4 to IPv6, build-ing private and hybrid cloud networks and evaluating software-defined networking (SDN) or network virtualization.

Journalists and analysts tend to refer to technology transitions as one-time events, or changeovers that can be measured in short periods of time. Frankly, IT users would like nothing more than for these

changes to be that clear cut. Unfortunately that’s not the case.

What we are learning is that making radi-cal network changes takes long periods of time, and often these changes demand en-gineers to run both old and new technology together.

In this issue of Network Evolution, we see multiple examples of what it looks like to make technology transitions by adopting new strategies while making the best of old. For example, very few IT shops will move entirely to running IPv6 networks; instead they’ll manage dual IPv4/IPv6 environ-ments. But IPv6 expert Ciprian Popoviciu

Network transi-tion is imminent,but users will find change isslow, and theymust use old andnew technologyat once.

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also suggests that network users look be-yond the move from IPv4 to IPv6 and con-sider redesigning their networks for both IPv6 and SDN at the same time. After all, if you’re going to rethink your entire network for one technology, why not take a bit more risk and get both changes done at once? He goes even further to explain how the two sets of technology can even benefit each other.

In another article, vet-eran IT journalist Antone Gonsalves writes about choosing between hosted and on-premises unified communications and col-laboration. Not surpris-ingly, many enterprises are using a little bit of both. For example, a large

enterprise might use on-premises video conferencing for its main campus while turning to hosted services for remote of-fices. Other companies choose to get the most out of on-premises equipment they already own, while slowly investing in hosted services for new additions to their collaboration portfolio.

The same kind of phenomenon is play-ing out in the cloud where enterprises are at once transitioning their enterprise data centers into mini clouds while also turning to cloud providers to use public resources for non-core applications. In this issue, tech writer Sally Johnson writes that en-terprises that are the most successful in using the cloud are those that don’t “hand-cuff” themselves to legacy equipment. These companies look to use both private and public cloud resources, but turn to

En terprises that are the most successful in

using the cloud are those that don’t “hand cuff” themselves to legacy

equipment.

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companies such as VMware for tools to help them manage across both on-prem-ises and hosted clouds, as well as legacy equipment.

In the end, users make transitions when they are at a pain point and need change badly enough to take risks. The trick is in

figuring out how to do so without losing ev-erything, and the answer may be to make the transition incrementally. Hopefully, this issue gives insight into that journey. n

Rivka Gewirtz Little

Executive Editor, Networking Media Group

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Ω Hybrid cloud blurs the lines of who’s responsible for what when sorting out enterprise IT and cloud provider roles.

The exponential growth of hybrid cloud leaves IT shops grappling with cru-cial questions, including: What is the role of the enterprise network in this shared scenario? Is software-defined networking (SDN) suddenly necessary? And perhaps the trickiest of all—when enterprise IT teams and service providers share environ-ments, who’s responsible for what?

Hybrid cloud infrastructure is defined by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology as: “A composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastru-

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Hybrid Cloud Challenges

Who’s in Charge When Public and Private Clouds Collide?

BY SALLY COLE JOHNSON

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ctures—private, community or public—that remain unique entities, but are bound to-gether by standardized or proprietary tech-nology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load bal-ancing between clouds).”

The key here is that “hybrid cloud is more than just a public cloud and a data center. Portability and the commonality of appli-cations and data are the things that really distinguish it,” said Mathew Lodge, vice president of cloud services for VMware.

On the networking front, “folks are sur-prised that they can re-ally rebuild in a hybrid cloud exactly the same architecture they have in the data center—com-pletely in software, with complete freedom, and

no requirement to reconfigure routers or physical network devices of any kind,” Lodge said.

This is why we’re seeing distinctions among public and private and hybrid cloud dissipate quickly. “Looking out at 2014 and beyond, nearly every enterprise network is going to be hybrid,” said Dave Bartoletti, Forrester a principal analyst who serves in-frastructure and operations professionals.

What Can You Do Differently in a Hybrid Cloud?The primary goal of the hybrid cloud is to move workloads from on-premises to the public cloud to take advantage of cloud scalability and cloud bursting, especially during massive computation or high-traffic situations.

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Hybrid cloud is more than just a public cloud

and a data center.

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One of the biggest differences between private and public cloud is how much of the stack you control—and hybrid cloud is where control of these two clouds collides.

When building a private cloud, you own all the services and technologies that make the servers, storage and network act like a cloud. In the public cloud, you’re consum-ing a service and don’t have direct control over network or storage devices or even the physical servers in the public cloud.

“Once an application surpasses a certain de-mand threshold and you want to spin up a few more instances of it on, say, Amazon, the applica-tions need to be able to behave [the same] way,” said Bartoletti. “Look at

the application architecture first to see if it works that way and can support that be-havior, then look at how the network works underneath it.”

Not many traditional enterprises are designed to cloud burst on their own, so during hybrid cloud planning, they’ve got to ask: What does the application need? What are we trying to do for the applica-tion? “In the cloud it really makes sense to take a workload-focused view,” Bartoletti explained.

Once you determine the kinds of appli-cations you want to move to the cloud, and what their specific storage and network-ing requirements are, then compare what you have internally to what’s available in the public cloud. “The options are really all over the place,” said Bartoletti.

There is such an abundance of options

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One of the biggest differences between

private and public cloud is how much of the stack you control.

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that Scott Sanchez, director of strategy for Rackspace, describes hybrid cloud as a gi-ant crate of Legos in all shapes, sizes and colors that can be used to build your dream cloud—as opposed to going to a toy store and picking out the one kit that comes clos-est to meeting your needs.

“Now you can actually assemble your best-fit solution,” Sanchez said. “In the past, you had to settle for a solution that gave you maybe 60% of what you wanted. With hybrid cloud, you can get to 100%—exactly what you want.”

SDN’s Role in Hybrid CloudTake a look around and you’ll quickly dis-cover that SDN is playing a huge role in the hybrid cloud. In fact, you can thank SDN for enabling the richness of options

available.NTT Communications executive vice

president of data center services Chris Eldredge likens SDN’s optimum routing capabilities to a highway with five lanes, where if four lanes are full, SDN automati-cally routes you over to the fifth lane to give you improved performance. “We’re seeing more requests for SDN infrastructure every day,” he noted.

VMware, which offers vCloud software and its own public cloud service, uses its new SDN-based network virtualization platform, NSX, to provide the service. “As a whole, NSX essentially gives you the pro-grammable network control and separa-tion—moving away from command-line to programmatic control of the network and network virtualization,” said Lodge.

That’s important to VMware’s customers

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for two reasons. “First, how can they join or connect their existing data center net-work that’s out in the cloud? In VMware’s case, they can do it with our vCloud Hy-brid Service,” Lodge said. “The second is they want to know if they can replicate all of the things they’re used to being able to do in physical networks in the cloud inside vCloud Hybrid Service. The answer is yes—SDN and NSX technologies enable it.”

Rackspace’s public cloud is also driven by SDN, with OpenStack baked natively in to the past few releases. “People running our products across private and public clouds can write their applications to take advan-tage of this application-driven network-ing,” said Sanchez.

But, Sanchez cautioned, “None of that means a thing if the person holding the keys to your firewall won’t let you connect.”

In other words, shifting to an SDN model requires an adjustment to the mind-set of the new model.

This mind-set shift requires “simultane-ously getting network gatekeepers com-fortable with the fact that they can have a high level of security, potentially even bet-ter with SDN, but it’s going to feel differ-ent,” explained Sanchez. “You may need to break a little glass in the process, but you’ll discover this is a good solution.”

Hybrid Cloud Challenges: People—and Networks Must ChangeThe biggest challenge, from Rackspace’s perspective, isn’t the technology involved in hybrid cloud. “The companies who are succeeding with hybrid cloud are the ones with leaders willing to give some of this

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new stuff a try and not handcuff everyone to 10-year-old technology models,” ex-plained Sanchez.

On the technology side, networking is, of course, one of the biggest hybrid cloud is-sues for enterprises. Everyone needs to be able to connect their networks together, and in doing so, often run into challenges.

“These sorts of challenges include how to do VPN termination or how to config-

ure DNS,” explained VM-ware’s Lodge. “What IP addresses and spaces you can use? How are you go-ing to route the traffic? These are the frequent bumps in the road we see for hybrid cloud deploy-ments. Customers are also often challenged when

they have to completely re-architect their applications for the public cloud provider, which may operate in a different way and can have very different assumptions about infrastructure.”

In terms of public cloud, Lodge pointed out that many enterprises rely on fairly sophisticated network topologies and con-figurations to do network isolation, which is critical to security segregation. “But this isn’t included in many of the public clouds,” he noted. “Most public clouds are a VM be-hind a firewall on the Internet; that’s not enough protection because the only thing that should be able to talk to it is the appli-cation layer.”

For cloud bursting, network challenges depend, in large part, upon the applications involved. “In many cases, enterprises need to use the same IP address space, where the

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Companies who are succeeding with hybrid cloud have leaders that

are not handcuffed to 10-year-old technology

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applications work,” explained Lodge. “But many public clouds don’t support foreign IP address spaces or any of the private net-work address spaces. We view being able to bring your own IP address as critical.”

One related challenge VMware is ad-dressing is enabling customers to stretch Layer 2 networks from their data center to the cloud across network domains. This “makes it look like both your VMs and data center are on the same network as far as the applications are concerned,” Lodge said.

How Are Providers Helping Customers?Nearly all cloud providers are offering some form of hybrid cloud service and various levels of support.

“Cloud providers are all trying to make it as easy as possible within a software-

defined environment so customers can configure networks as needed,” said Bar-toletti. “They provide network services for defining IP addresses, setting up load bal-ancers, etc., to give customers some control over how their public network operates in the cloud.”

For its part, VMware is attempting to make life easier by extending its virtual-ized networking tools to work the same way across both public and private clouds.

Rackspace is helping customers create the best-fit solution for their applications, workloads and business—rearranging them as needed to solve their problems.

“The best way we can help customers is to encourage them to view hybrid cloud as an outcome, a mind-set much like happi-ness, as opposed to a product you can buy,” explained Sanchez.

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Is There a Distinction of Responsibilities in the Hybrid Cloud?The short answer: No.

“The line is definitely blurred,” Bartoletti said. “If you set up a virtual private cloud and connect it to your data center, you’re still responsible for how the network be-haves. While a traditional network admin-istrator will probably spend a lot less time configuring network devices in the cloud, they’re still responsible for quality of ser-vice for throughput, for bandwidth, and for latency issues. Those are still the responsi-bility of the owner of the application.”

As network architect and “Ethereal Mind” blogger Greg Ferro put it, “There is no clear ownership—it varies on a case-by-case basis.”

For Infrastructure as a Service hybrid clouds, Ferro sees some demarcation

because the VM container is usually clearly defined. But there are also storage and network considerations that he describes as difficult, if not impossible, to measure. “For Platform as a Service and Software as a Service hybrids, the lines are very blurred,” he said. “You can measure service-level agreements around the delivery of some elements, but there are hundreds inside the stack that remain unresolved.”

Determining who’s responsible for what is an area that will continue to evolve with hybrid cloud, and hopefully, the line will eventually become clearly defined. In the meantime, there’s a bit of trust involved in hybrid cloud. “But you should pay close at-tention to service-level agreements with providers and ask about any concerns up front,” Bartoletti recommended. n

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Ω Proprietary UC hardware isn’tthe only game in town now that companies can choose specific cloud-based UC options that benefit their business.

To eliminate too many potential points of failure, Hoffman Southwest Corp. in Mission Viejo, Calif. built a private cloud to route voice calls 24/7 at its dispatch cen-ter for Roto-Rooter plumbing and drainage service technicians. Having moved away from public branch exchanges (PBXs) in early 2013, the Roto-Rooter franchisee is now looking at adding on cloud-based UC services.

Across the country in Exton, Pa., New Era Tickets runs its call center on software

Cloud-Based UC

When Cloud-Based UC Makes Business Sense

BY ANTONE GONSALVES

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hosted by a specialized cloud-based UC call center provider. Using this business model since 2011, New Era’s 75 agents handled half a million calls in the last year to sell tickets for its customers—more than 40 sports and entertainment organizations. The provider’s call-center software tells agents which venue the caller is interested in to make answering the call more per-sonal; it also automatically provides a Web page with information about the event to help with taking the order.

Enterprises in the forefront of moving to cloud-based UC are of-ten those whose business models depend on ad-vanced communications capabilities. These often include financial institu-tions and companies with

call centers such as New Era Tickets. For some, the cloud can provide the security, flexibility and cost savings that older tech-nology cannot match.

John Andros, Hoffman’s principal archi-tect for enterprise IT and telecom, needed to have a flexible, fail-safe communications system for the dispatch center because “in-coming customer calls are the business,” he said.

Only a few years ago, the proprietary hardware approach was the only game in town. Now businesses have an expanding number of UC options to choose from. New software-based UC start-ups and cloud ser-vice providers are spurring the old-guard vendors to add options to their traditional hardware approaches. All this change gives enterprises a choice in how to best deploy different UC elements to their end users.

Businesses have an expanding number of UC options to choose from.

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Although UC is still largely an on-prem-ises technology, the evolution from buying proprietary hardware to running software on virtualized commodity servers is well on its way.

Long before virtualization took hold, a fundamental shift in enterprise telephony helped usher in unified communications and collaboration. The migration from PBXs, which require separate voice and data communications networks, to the IP PBX, the Internet-based telephone switch-

ing system that enables the use of converged voice and data networks, made new communications ser-vices possible.

Of course the workhorse PBX hasn’t vanished, yet. The technology is alive

and well, though diminishing. Over the next three-to-five years, the most success-ful vendors will provide some UC compo-nents on-premises and others as a cloud service, says Gartner’s lead UC analyst Bern Elliot. For example, companies are more likely to add a feature like Web conferencing if they have the ability to increase or decrease the number of users as needed.

A glance at the UC landscape illustrates the point. Cisco offers its hosted collabo-ration suite; Microsoft sells Office 365; Siemens plans to make its newly renamed Unify suite generally available mid-2014; and Avaya unveiled its Collaborative Cloud framework this year. In general, either by themselves or with partners, these vendors can provide basic UC elements that in-clude instant messaging (IM), Voice over IP

The migration from PBX to IP PBX made

new communications services possible.

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(VoIP), videoconferencing, Web conferenc-ing and desktop sharing.

The key advantage companies find in cloud-based UC services is flexibility. “Those services that are critical to the business, like telephone communications at a hospital, can remain in-house, while other services like Web conferencing can be added via the cloud,” Elliot said. “This type of hybrid environment is the direction companies are moving.”

In a survey of 140 purchasing decision-makers that use unified VoIP, email and IM at midsize and large North America enter-prises, Infonetics Research found that 87% plan to add video conferencing by August 2014. In addition, 22% of the respondents had implemented portions of their UC ar-chitecture in a private cloud, and 19% had placed UC services in a public cloud.

Starting With Voice, Hoffman Considers More UC Services Before moving to its private cloud at the beginning of 2013, Hoffman had traditional PBXs in all its locations. Now from its data center at its California headquarters, in-coming calls are routed to Hoffman’s 75 dispatchers located either in Mission Viejo or in its Corona, Calif., facility.

Already a Mitel Networks customer, Hoffman deployed the vendor’s private cloud configuration and hosts its own com-munications controllers and Mitel’s UC suite in data centers on servers powered by VMware’s virtualization platform in its headquarters data center.

“It eliminates all those multiple points of failure when you have everything coming right here to corporate,” Andros said.

Handling calls for 12 Roto-Rooter

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plumbing and drain services operating in California, Arizona, Utah, Texas and Oregon, the agents take the customer in-formation and send it to the appropriate Roto-Rooter office. Beyond the dispatch center, the Mitel system handles all voice communications for Hoffman’s 400 employees.

The company has a backup facility in Phoenix, Ariz., which is used during power outages or when the main data center is down for maintenance. All the company’s

offices are connected to the data centers us-ing Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), and Mitel hosts the gateway that sends calls to the Hoffman data centers.

All employees have IP

phones, and managers use Mitel’s desktop software for interoffice chat, Web confer-encing and voicemail. Its Web conferencing capabilities are used regularly for opera-tions and sales meetings with the field of-fices. About two dozen employees have company-issued tablets or smartphones so they can participate in Web conferences remotely.

A majority of enterprises add individual UC elements as they go along rather than deploying all options at once. Hoffman is no exception. The company is in the “feel-ing-out phase” with video conferencing but hasn’t decided whether to buy the service. Andros has used video conferencing to help troubleshoot when one of the regional sites is having equipment problems.

All of Hoffman’s Roto-Rooter techni-cians use company-issued Samsung Galaxy

Many enterprises add individual UC elements as they go rather than

deploying them all at once.

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S3 smartphones that run over the Sprint network but are purchased through Mitel. Hoffman uses Citrix XenMobile to manage and provision all the devices, Andros added.

Hoffman may decide to route all mobile calls through the Mitel network rather than the Sprint network to get quick access to call history and to record technicians’ con-versations with customers. The company first wanted to determine network costs without mobile services before deciding whether to make the change.

For New Era Tickets, Niche Call Center UC Provider Won the DayTo handle an estimated 500,000 calls a year from people who want to buy tickets, Ticketmaster competitor New Era Tickets runs its call center on software hosted by

Interactive Intelligence, a niche provider that sells an all-in-one product for call cen-ter and UC functionality.

New Era provides customized ticketing services for more than 40 sports and enter-tainment organizations, theaters, arenas and event promoters. At New Era’s Penn-sylvania headquarters, 75 call agents and 30 business operations employees use In-teractive Intelligence’s call center and VoIP applications, which are hosted in the pro-vider’s data center in Mount Carmel, Ind. New Era also has 15 agents and operations employees based in Canada and Singapore.

Each New Era customer has its own toll-free number that connects callers to an automated greeting with information on upcoming events and ticket options. After choosing an option, the caller is routed to a media server in one of the call centers,

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which directs the call to an available agent. Via the call center software, New Era agents have access to features they wouldn’t have otherwise.

“When the agent gets a call, they get a whisper in their ear [via Interactive’s soft-ware] telling them which venue it is for so they know how to answer the call,” said Pa-mela Nealman, director of contact centers for New Era. The Interactive Intelligence software also automatically sends a Web page with all of the information about the venue and the event to the agent’s com-puter to help with taking the order.

All calls are recorded and stored on Inter-active Intelligence servers, which connect to New Era’s contact centers using MPLS.

With Interactive Intelligence hosting the call center software, New Era can run IT operations in its own headquarters with

only four people, Nealman said.New Era realized major savings in start-

up costs, which are much lower than in-vesting in hardware, a software license and hiring a full-time telecommunications engineer, Nealman said. After start up, the hosted model is “a little cheaper” than hav-ing the software on premises. “It was signif-icant enough that we chose the cloud-based [system],” she said.

Among the advantages, New Era pays a monthly fee for a base number of us-ers and has the flexibility to add more for an additional cost if call volume increases unexpectedly.

Weighing Cloud-Based UC AdvantagesWhile New Era and Hoffman are not mas-sive UC deployments, both represent

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where the market is heading. “As a whole, the enterprise market is a mixed bag when it comes to adopting cloud-based UC as a Service,” Gartner’s Elliot said. “It’s not like the market moves as a mass.”

For example, in a large company with lots of branch offices, corporate headquarters may use on-premises video conferenc-ing, while remote offices may use a cloud-based service. The same is true of email, Elliot said. Headquarters may need an

email server for compliance and backup, but branch offices with fewer requirements may get by using Google’s Gmail.

Larger enterprises are likely to be more incremental in moving to cloud-based UC than small and medium-sized businesses, but there’s little doubt that the future is in having more choice than on-premises hardware. Now that they have options, businesses can move to cloud-based UC for reasons as varied as their businesses. n

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n=1,000; Source: Uptime Institute’s 2013 Annual Data Center Industry survey

80%

12% A small

number of workers have it

8% Currently testing UC

15% No immediate

UC testing plans

16% Planning to test in the next

year 26+23+16+15+12+8k Out of all UC application options, the most frequently deployed are

k Who’s using UC anyway?

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26% Partially deployed

across the company

23% Fully

deployed across the company

Source: TechTarget Unified Communications Survey

45% 43%

VoIP Audio conferencing

Web conferencing

Unified messaging

60%63%

362412

Percentage of networking pros said that improving worker productivity is a main business driver in their companies’ network investment.

Percentage of networking pros ranked UC in their top-3 technology priorities over the next year.

Percentage of networking pros include UC among their networking responsibilities.

Source: 2013 TechTarget Networking Purchasing Intentions Survey

Source: TechTarget Unified Communications survey

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IPV6 AND SDN

Ω A funny thing happened on the way to advanced network redesign: IPv6 and SDN turn out to be interrelated and benefit each other.

What do IPv6 and software-defined net-working have in common? Not a lot, but then again, oh so much. Both IPv6 and SDN stand to radically change the way we build networks, and if implemented correctly, both play a role in making the cloud and IT as a Service more of a reality.

In the last five years, server and storage virtualization have revolutionized IT, en-abling flexible provisioning of resources that can be used for an agile cloud. But the rigid network has been a bottleneck. Now,

IPv6 and SDN

IPv6 and SDN: The Perfect Networking Cocktail

BY CIPRIAN POPOVICIU

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IPV6 AND SDN

SDN promises to virtualize the rest of the data center infrastructure and make it so that network resources can be provisioned on demand and integrated into overall cloud orchestration.

Meanwhile, as IPv4 addresses become rapidly depleted, service providers and en-

terprises are under pres-sure to transition their networks to IPv6.

Here is where SDN and IPv6 implementation meet. If both technolo-gies require network teams to rethink network design, why not do both at once? The good news is that these two technol-ogy trends can be mutu-ally beneficial.

The Perfect Storm: IPv6, SDN, Cloud as Inflexion PointsIt’s clear that SDN and IPv6 are both cru-cial for the long-term vision of the cloud. IPv6 is necessary for scalability; SDN en-ables infrastructure flexibility and both play into cloud agility. But why must SDN and IPv6 transition occur at once?

n Why IPv6 transition now? There is no shortage of hype around the Internet of Things and its ability to let us network ev-erything from corporate servers to home refrigerators. But to make that possible, we’ll need more IP addresses as there sim-ply aren’t enough IPv4 addresses available to handle this kind of growth. Without IPv6, the evolution of the Internet and intranets alike would be slowed at best, but more likely halted due to the lack of

Figure 1. The three technology inflexion points

in IT infrastructure transformation.

CloudAgility

SDNFlexibility

IPv6Scalability

IT Infrastructure

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both unicast and multicast addresses. But beyond that, IPv6 enables a range of other features important for growth, in-cluding simpler IP address management, as well improved packet processing and routing.

n What’s so important about SDN flex-ibility? We are finally bringing the network into the service delivery process as an ac-tive, flexible, adaptable and competitive re-source. SDN enables IT teams to automate provisioning of virtual network resources, spinning up virtual instances of network with related Layer 4-7 services in a way that is application aware. Also, SDN allows IT shops to use less expensive hardware with software that takes over the complicated job of the network. As a result, software-driven networks will be more cost effective

and better integrated with the other com-ponents of IT infrastructure. In the long run, all three will be provisioned specifi-cally for the demands of services and ap-plications and rolled back when they’re not being used.

n Cloud adoption delivers agility: The orchestration of compute, network and storage resources make delivering flexible cloud services possible. Without the ability to provision infrastructure on demand, it could take weeks or months instead of min-utes to make an application go live on the network, or to change capacity to improve performance.

These inflexion points might be at differ-ent stages of maturity, but they are likely to hit IT organizations within a short win-dow of time. SDN controllers and cloud

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orchestrators must be integrated to align application hosting infrastructure with the service delivery network infrastructure and to deliver optimal end-to-end services properly. Yet it’ll take IPv6 to enable the scale of cloud infrastructure and SDN. This perfect storm of technology and process transformation must be very well managed.

SDN Must Be IPv6-Based Not Just IPv6-ReadyWhen it comes to IPv6 implementation, we often hear the term “IPv6-ready,” or that products offer “feature and performance parity with IPv4.” Too often this means IT teams are considering options that help them add IPv6 addresses without rethink-ing their architecture to enable all the fea-tures this technology could bring to bear.

SDN product manufacturers are already asking their potential customers to make massive shifts in their networks, so they should be developing solutions are IPv6-based, not just IPv6-ready. This way, cus-tomers can fully leverage the resources and capabilities offered by IPv6. After all, IPv6 solves more than just address depletion problem. The newer addressing system supports multicast rather than broadcast, which saves bandwidth by enabling packet flows to be sent to multiple destinations at once. Also, because of the difference in address header, IPv6 eliminates IP-level checksum, making packet processing more efficient. Address assignment and manage-ment also become simpler in IPv6.

The availability of globally unique uni-cast addresses for all interfaces simpli-fies SDN implementations. The link-local

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communication implemented by IPv6 can be leveraged for a hop-by-hop control plane independent of the unicast address plan. Another example where IPv6-specific fea-tures can be used is the flow label. This is prime real estate in the main IPv6 packet header that can be used for flow tracking and for maintaining state across federated SDN domains.

On the flip side, SDN can also make the transition to IPv6 simpler. When users deploy IPv6, they run a dual-stack en-vironment, which proves to be complex and expen-sive. We already know the difficulties of managing the asymmetries between the IPv4 and IPv6 flows in a dual-stack network. In

software networks, engineers can smoothly migrate services from one IP protocol to the other while making the management of dual-stacked environments more deter-ministic. The analogy that comes to mind is the ease with which we are able to IPv6-enable and manage MPLS-based back-bones that were already delivering IPv4 services.

Enterprises should implement new technology that takes full advantage of all of these features. The SDN world should learn a lesson from OpenStack, which became IPv6-ready only with the Grizzly release. Waiting so long made provisioning difficult in an IPv6 environment, and as a result many OpenStack implementations still fail to leverage IPv6-specific func-tionality in facilitating the orchestration process.

The availability of globally unique uni cast addresses

for all interfaces simplifies SDN

implementations.

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IPv6, SDN Transitions: Timing Is EverythingBoth SDN and IPv6 transition efforts are expected to start over the next 24 months. As a result, IPv6 can be a great precursor and catalyst for SDN.

For one thing, tackling both at once helps with the potential downtime caused by re-design. Network infrastructure changes have significant impact to service deliv-ery. IPv6 will also require such changes. IT teams could leverage this planned downtime to work on the rollout of SDN technology. Moreover, IPv6 is deployed as an overlay, dual-stack, where IPv6 and IPv4 run in parallel as ships in the night. This means SDN can be trialed and

demonstrated on IPv6 without impacting IPv4-based production services. Many IT organizations, from service providers to enterprises used the IPv6 transition as an opportunity to test a new architecture, in-dependent of the existing, production IPv4 one.

Ultimately, the IPv6 transition is in-evitable and likely to occur within a time-frame relevant to SDN adoption. The IPv6 transition strategy should include the software-defined networking vision for the organization. The transition can be lever-aged to refresh the infrastructure for SDN readiness, train staff for SDN and use new SDN-enabled infrastructure to make the IPv6 transition easier. n

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THE VOICE OF EVOLUTION | SHAMUS MCGILLICUDDY

Bare-Metal Switches: Will Merchant Silicon Take Over Networking?

Half a decade ago, the Barenaked Ladies played at Cisco Live in Orlando. I skipped the performance because I have good taste.

Today I can’t help but wonder if Cisco was prescient with its choice of mediocre musical entertainment, because the net-working industry is baring it all. A grow-ing number of vendors are promoting networking architectures that decouple software from hardware and run on bare-metal switches. It’s easier to do this now that merchant silicon vendors like Broad-com and Intel are ramping up the process-ing power of off-the-shelf chips for network

hardware. The trend is similar to what hap-pened in the compute market when x86 operating systems were decoupled from bare-metal servers.

Companies like Cumulus Networks, Pica8 and Big Switch Networks are all sell-ing network operating systems designed to run on bare-metal switches. In a perfect world, these vendors don’t want anything to do with hardware. They’d rather sell you software and services and have you buy your own switches from Accton, Penguin Computing or Quanta. Then you’d simply boot up the networking software just as a systems engineer does with his servers.

Vendors are pushing network architecture that decouples software from hardware and runs on merchantsilicon. Have we reached the x86 era of networking?

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These vendors aren’t exactly titans of the industry, but they’re also not alone in their bare-metal, software-centric view of the world. Arista Networks doesn’t tout the bare-metal model, but it emphasizes soft-ware over hardware and builds its switches on Broadcom chips. If Arista were launched today, I suspect the company’s business model would look a lot more like what Cu-mulus has.

Then we have Facebook, which has ex-panded its Open Compute Project (OCP)

into switching. Facebook has been developing a bare-metal switch inter-nally, much like Google did years ago. Unlike Google, Facebook is push-ing its prototype out into the market through the

OCP, so its specs will eventually be em-braced by Cumulus, Pica8 and Big Switch. Meanwhile white box vendors like Accton in Asia will build the switches, and networking vendors will help them build robust supply chains so that mainstream enterprises can buy in more easily.

Cisco has caught on to this bare-metal enthusiasm … at least in lip service. Cisco isn’t decoupling IOS from its Cata-lyst switches or NX-OS from its Nexus switches, but the company’s new Nexus 9000 series born out of spin-in Insieme Networks will be based on both merchant silicon and proprietary ASICs and have the ability to run two different Cisco op-erating systems, depending on which ar-chitecture data center operators choose. When I spoke to Frank D’Agostino,

Facebook has been developing a bare-metal switch inter nally, much

like Google did years ago.

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Insieme’s senior director of technical mar-keting and solutions, he told me to consider the new Nexus 9000 switches “like bare-metal switches.”

The Nexus 9000 switches don’t meet my definition of bare metal, which holds that a device should be able to run any software that’s written to the hardware architec-ture. I doubt that Cisco will ever allow data center operators to do that, so instead it’s giving engineers a choice between two of

its proprietary operating systems. Nevertheless, Cisco must see the bare metal trend as a threat or it wouldn’t be co-opting the phrase.

Despite the bare metal buzz, going the way of merchant silicon will

require something of a religious conver-sion. Companies like Facebook and Google that depend on technology to be their dif-ferentiator can afford to push their engi-neers out of their comfort zones with new kinds of networks, but mainstream enter-prise IT organizations have a much lower affinity for revolutionary change. Gener-ally, network engineers are the whipping boys of IT. When outages happen, everyone points fingers at the network. Networkers have responded by sticking with the most dependable and highly supported plat-forms they can find. Until today, those plat-forms have been closed boxes that feature a proprietary mix of hardware and software. That’s precisely how Cisco has maintained its margins and market share throughout the 21st century.

Yet a growing minority of engineers

Despite the bare metal buzz, going the way

of merchant silicon will require something of

a religious conver sion.

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wants things to change. Data center op-erators need networks to be more nim-ble, automated and responsive. Closed systems from the Ciscos of the world haven’t evolved fast enough to answer the call. As a result we’ve seen a tsunami of

software-defined networking and network virtualization hype wash over the industry. Bare-metal switching is yet another out-growth of this whole movement. Network engineers will eventually have to decide if they want to take the plunge. n

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CONTRIBUTORS

ANTONE GONSALVES is a journalist who has covered general, business and technology news for more than 25 years, for a wire service, magazines and websites. You can follow him on Twitter at @antoneg.

RIVKA GEWIRTZ LITTLE is the executive editor of Tech-Target’s Networking Media Group. They recently launched SearchSDN.com, a new site on software-de-fined networking and network programmability.

SALLY COLE JOHNSON is a freelance writer based in New Hampshire. She specializes in physics, photonics, semi-conductors and software-defined networking.

SHAMUS MCGILLICUDDY is the director of news and fea-tures for TechTarget’s Networking Media Group. He writes about networking, security, data centers, network management and other topics for SearchNetworking.com. He also manages overall news coverage for Tech-Target’s other networking sites, including SearchUni-fiedCommunications.com, SearchEnterpriseWAN.com and SearchCloudProvider.com.

CIPRIAN POPOVICIU is president, CEO and founder of Nephos6, a consultancy specializing in IPv6 and cloud computing. He is a recognized IPv6 domain expert, con-tributing to both protocol standardization and the defi-nition of national-level strategies for IPv6 adoption.COVER PHOTOGRAPH: KESU/FOTOLIA

Network Evolution  is a SearchNetworking.com e-publication.

Kate Gerwig, Editorial Director

Rivka Gewirtz Little, Executive Editor

Shamus McGillicuddy, Director of News and Features

Kara Gattine, Senior Managing Editor

Chuck Moozakis, Site Editor

Tessa Parmenter, Site Editor

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Neva Maniscalco, Graphic Designer

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