hotlinx-39

Vendor ViewsDoomsday? Not Here!By Paul Gainham, Senior Director ofSolutions Marketing EMEA, Juniper NetworksMaybe it’s due to the exhaustion of IPv4addresses, it could be down to the recentcoverage of some routers reaching theirmaximum routing table size but I havehad to answer more questions regardingwhether the Internet has reached its limitin the last few weeks than at any time Ican remember.Whilst the press are always looking for asensational angle, it is a valid question.The Internet as we know it is doing thingsnow it was never designed for, at a scalethat none of us imagined and guess what,there is more to come.100 billion newdevices frommeters to smartslippers, the gigabitsmartphone, theCloud, Quad HDTV and the ‘Exabyteflood’ of traffic all lie ahead and that’s ontop of the estimated 10 billion devicesalready connected.The first comment to make has tobe congratulations to the foresightednetworking engineers, product designersand technology visionaries, the earlySDN: An Architectural Conceptfor Network EvolutionBy Markus Nispel, Vice President SolutionsArchitecture and Innovation, Extreme NetworksThe advent of Software DefinedNetworking (SDN 1.0), includingApplication Programming Interfaces(APIs) and the OpenFlow andOpenStack protocols have served todisrupt the network market.Network architectures are steadilymigrating from a world of static and“closed” approaches to open approachesallowing IT to combine multi-vendorsolutions more effectively. We call this“SDN 2.0” and it is reshaping the waythe network is built by implementinga more standardised, multi-vendorapproach that helps to activateinnovation in both hardware andsoftware. These solutions influence theedge of the network, where wired andwireless access promote “BYOD” and inthe data center.At ExtremeNetworks, weprovide anevolutionary “SDN2.0” approach thatwill allow the organisation to improvewhat they already have by adding newfunctionality and programmability thatcan leverage existing network switches.By adding affordable and flexibleadditions to the existing infrastructure,businesses can gain increased flexibility,programming capabilities and networkautomation. The network can thenintegrate with other IT applications(business applications, workflow tools,DevOps, security, server virtualisationand orchestration, L4-7 network services,traffic analysis and characterisation ofapplications) and new applications ontop of the network, quickly and efficiently.work of whom pioneered a phenomenonwhose basic building blocks have notdramatically changed in the 25+ yearssince its popular inception and have seenit scale to touch just about every aspect ofmodern lifestyle.So are we to witness the catastrophe ofSaturday night TV screens going blank andStrictly Come Dancing being consigned tocultural history? In short, No.With current networks operating in the100GE range, current fibre plant that canscale to 10’s of Tbps per pair, modernrouting platforms that can switch 10’sof Tbps of traffic today, 400GE on thehorizon and talk of Terabit Ethernet tocome, the future scale of the Internetlooks to be in good hands.My smart slippers have never had it so good.The “SDN 2.0” approach integrateswith existing network switches andprovides an improved solution to helpovercome a businesses’ past reluctanceto adopt SDN, as many presumed thattheir existing product investments wouldbe made obsolete by requiring all newequipment.A more efficient andstandards-basednetwork architecture was required tomore dynamically adapt to the business’sneeds and allows customers to moreeasily mix and match their software andhardware components from differentvendors. As business requirements aredynamic and change quickly, SDN hadto be architected to handle networkresources in a more flexible, agile andresponsive way, providing programmabilityand more effective network management.Businesses should consider what theywould like to achieve through a nextgeneration network for the benefit ofthe business, assess their existing networkinfrastructure and create a strategy thatwill enable them to leverage existinginvestments.14 HotLINX Issue 39 | Meeting Sponsors