Software Defined-Wide Area Networks (SD-WAN)
When I was asked to write this blog post I said to myself “self, this new technology reminds me of another change in the norm I experienced many years ago”. Let me explain.
Everyone remembers when analog/digital voice was the predominant technology for telephony and then suddenly, and with a lot of anxiety Voice over IP (VoIP) hit the mainstream and all the telecom technicians were worried about their careers because telephony was something they understood and maintained for many, many years. “This new technology has moved over to the network geeks and I am out of a job. What am I going to do?!”
Now I know you are wondering what that little technology history snip-it has to do with this new blog, well it is just another technology going through a similar transformation, a paradigm shift, if you will of moving away from traditional routing based WAN technologies such as MPLS, dedicated circuits such as T1/T3 and of course the traditional broadband connectivity to a newer virtual based technology, providing a whole new level of management of your WAN and applications no matter where they reside and they call this Software Defined-Wide Are Networks. Huh?
Reading many publications and articles on this new technology was at best daunting at least to the traditional WAN/Network skill sets I am familiar with. Basically if you need to make a change, let’s say on an MPLS network with 50 routers, you have to make that change 50 times. Okay, I could go with that reasoning, always like to make administration of my network easier, but it was more than that, it was the direction of application provisioning and where they are residing, and we all know that means applications in the cloud or Software as a Service (SaaS).
Cloud services are at the center of growth for many firms and with that there will no doubt have transformational impacts on IT resource plans on how to deliver these applications with speed, reliability and security. With traditional services like MPLS which were designed for data center centric applications it was a no brainer on what was needed. MPLS came with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that delivered consistent performance and access for an enterprises applications, but now with cloud based applications the traditional way to deliver applications goes out the window. There are no guarantees of latency or delivery, Quality of Service (QoS) is non-existent and the chances of getting dedicated connectivity to many of SaaS offerings are little to none. The answer is SD-WAN.
We are not saying that MPLS has no place for the future, it definitely has but when you need the flexibility, scalability and the low cost of broadband SD-WAN can make the impossible, possible.
SD-WAN can assist with the shortcomings of traditional WAN technologies by putting a secure, virtualized overlay on top of the WAN to enable administrators to deliver high visibility by the use of dynamic multi-path control over multiple sources of connectivity. In other words, SD-WAN turns the WAN into a geographically distributed LAN which can be deployed faster and managed centrally.
Gartner® sites four key components of SD-WAN:
- Provides a lightweight replacement for traditional WAN routers and are agnostic to WAN transport
- Allows for load sharing of traffic across multiple WAN connections in an efficient and dynamic fashion that can be based on business or application policies.
- Simplifies the complexity associated with management, configuration and orchestration of WANs.
- Provide secure VPNs and have the ability to integrate additional network services.
It all makes sense to me why SD-WAN is now needed. The need to manage multiple applications geographically dispersed and accessed in a variety of connections is key to success of the Cloud. Too many times I hear cloud-based applications are faster from home than the office. I scratch my head and wonder why when I have enterprise class Internet and MPLS connectivity internationally.
The reason, I finally figured out is that traditionally I had users in another office traverse the WAN then out the Internet from the data center and back, rather than allowing the best path to access the application which could mean never touching the traditional WAN thus leveraging broadband and reducing my costs.
I kept thinking, okay I am going to have to rip and replace to take advantage of this new technology. The answer, to my amazement is no, SD-WAN devices whether it be from Cisco, Silver Peak, Riverbed and other vendors you can implement in a few offices and familiarize yourself with the technology and later scale out to support as many offices as you have.
Now remember that little history snip-it. The landscape for administrators is changing for this new technology as well. You will need to begin learning a scripting language to administer some manufacturers’ devices. Some of these languages are the tried and true Python, Pearl and others.
Some manufacturers are burning the midnight oil to provide GUI front-ends or automated processes to what a lot of administrators are seeing as complicated or a bit daunting at best. I did a podcast a couple of years ago about Software Defined Networking with a network expert and a lot of interesting facts even back in 2014 left me scratching my head and still asking more questions.
http://www.iltanet.org/viewdocument/software-defined-networkingopenflo
You will find that more infrastructure rules will become embedded in code which means network administrators of the future will become part of DevOps, which as we all know is a group that deals with rapid iteration of software changes. It also means that administrators must have better programming tools, enhanced monitoring tools and more ways to automate those processes.
I hope I brought some clarity to this new and intriguing technology. Or heck I may have muddied the waters for some of you. The main point is that if you are one of those network geeks like me, make sure you stay on top of this technology, learn new things and you will be a part of the networking future just like those old telephony administrators did 15 years ago.
Links
Software Defined Networks for Dummies
SDN 101: Software Defined Networking explained in 10 easy steps
Software Defined Networking Tutorial - The Basics