Software Defined Networking Use Case

Since VMware purchased Nicera in July 2012 there has been a lot of excitement about the benefits of software defined networking (SDN) but it has mostly been a theoretical discussion since the enabling software has been pre-GA. That is starting to change with the general availability release of VMware NSX and anticipated release of Cisco’s SDN solution in addition to the growing maturity of open source solutions. 

My colleague, Nikhil Sharma wrote post about the requirements for the wide spread adaption of a new technology here. I think we are seeing this process happening with software defined networking. I recently described the technology preview demonstrations we showed at VMworld this year here. As Nikhil points a technology like SDN is not production ready until it is “solutionized”. We demonstrated several use cases leveraging NSX SDN technology to provide new storage capabilities at VMworld this year.

One of the most interesting was a data protection bandwidth on demand project we are developing. Traditionally our customers implement a combination of our data protection technologies such as RecoverPoint, and VPLEX to meet their Disaster Recovery and High Availability needs. The customer’s network teams engage with us on a detailed network bandwidth sizing exercise. Dedicated network bandwidth for each traffic type would be created. Each of the dedicated links would be sized for the worst-case scenario.

 

After the implementation, any changes to bandwidth capacity would be difficult and disruptive to implement. Often the network link utilization would be low except during a few peak utilization times and often only one of the replication links would be maximized at any given time. 

At VMworld we demonstrated a data protection bandwidth on demand solution leveraging NSX SDN. The solution layers software defined network abstraction by having:

• the physical network bandwidth is created and available to the NSX controller
• the EMC data replication services are presented to the SDN links instead of the physical network links

The physical network links can then be shared across all the services and additional physical bandwidth can be added and deleted dynamically without interrupting data protection. It would look like this:

 

As bandwidth requirements change for each of the data protection services the network capacity can be flexed by reallocating capacity from a service not needing the capacity right now, or additional physical links could be dynamically allocated and used by the SDN controller to meet the short term needs.

This is an example of using NSX to improve IT service flexibility and reliability. This is why we think SDN adaption will accelerate rapidly.

We are looking for customers to help shape how we bring this bandwidth on demand capability. If you want more information or are interested in partnering with us to bring this capability to market contact Kevin Murphy.

What are your plans to “solutionize” SDN in 2014?

Comments

[reconquistar ex]

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[Solutionizeit]

Great use case Ed. Just one more way how Software defined networking will Solutionize IT.