Published on the 10/06/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Software defined networks are and will be important, especially as cloud computing gathers pace, but the journey’s only just begun…
Software and networking vendors regularly punt the credentials and capabilities of software defined networking (SDN) arguing that it could deliver a similar sort of economy and flexibility as server virtualisation. But users report it’s still early days.
Rod Muller, principal network architect in the office of the Queensland Government CIO, said SDN had been considered for the State’s Citec data centres, but had not been deployed due to a lack of maturity and standards. At this stage “The Queensland Government is not running SDN in any of its data centres,” he said.
However Muller did believe SDN was an important technology as, by establishing a virtual layer that sat on top of networking hardware, it delivered agility, allowing rapid configuration and remodelling of computer solutions. At the moment he said engineers were often “hamstrung by traditional networks” especially when delivering cloud style solutions.
He believed that at present, SDN remains confined to the very largest data centres, such as those operated by Rackspace, Amazon Web Services and the like, noting that for more conventionally scaled enterprises SDN was still in its early stages.
Hatem Naguib, vice president of network security for VMware, who was in Australia this month, acknowledged that there were still fewer than 100 users of VMware’s SDN systems in Australia. But he remains optimistic that progress is being made especially in Government, IT service providers and large financial institutions which are constructing private clouds, and where systems security is a priority.
“Three years ago this was for the very early adopter. Now we are seeing more mainstream users.”
Naguib said that while virtual machines could be provisioned in seconds, it still took days or weeks to provision conventional networks, and this would spawn demand for SDN. In the future he said the only role for networking hardware would be “to provide bandwidth.”
According to a survey of 1421 IT professionals, including around 100 Australians, released by Avaya in February this year, the preferred SDN model is to use a virtualised network layer atop a conventional network. That report suggested a relatively high penetration of SDN in Australia already with 39 per cent of respondents claiming to have SDN in part of their network.
However 45 per cent of the survey’s total respondents who have yet to deploy SDN said they still had no timeline for a rollout – with many saying they had more urgent priorities.
