Open Network Featured Article

In many ways, the Internet of Things (IoT) is still a fairly new technology, and one with plenty of room to grow and improve. Avaya (News - Alert) is capitalizing on this, drawing on the power of open networking and changing its architecture to make IoT use not only easier, but also more secure.

Avaya has been steadily expanding its operations in terms of network virtualization, with a new network architecture that went from the data center to the network edge. Such a plan allowed for easier connections to the network itself, whether connecting devices alone or people using devices. Avaya could use its Fabric Connect systems to better connect to a software-defined networking (SDN) Fx architecture, and include Avaya's Open Networking Adapter (ONA) as well. Since ONA is based on the open source Open vSwitch system, most any device that had an Ethernet port could readily connect to the network and expect good quality security.

With the release of the new ONA 1.0—which Avaya was focusing on the healthcare field and getting open networking into that arena—Avaya was ready to show off what open networking could do for a field that both had a lot of connected devices on hand, but also had a lot of external regulation surrounding its everyday operations. With the SDN Fx architecture able to support as many as 168,000 devices at once, it's the kind of thing that could readily stand up to many common IoT environments.

It's not just the changing customer landscape that's driving Avaya's new systems, though; changes within Avaya itself are also dictating new movement. The company is facing a lot of competition from companies like Cisco and Microsoft (News - Alert), and so it's important to determine its place in the market. As such, it's increasingly focusing on software and services, and pulling away from its original protocols as a hardware maker. With tools like the SDN Fx architecture, it's having some particular success as a provider of tools that can be scaled to meet needs, are sufficiently open to be readily usable, but are secure enough to be worth bringing in.

In that vein, the choice to bring ONA to healthcare might be considered a kind of stress-test environment, a sort of “if it's good enough to stand up to HIPAA regulation, it can take whatever you can dish out” philosophy. After all, healthcare has some of the strongest, federally-required rules about security protection there are; if a system can run in a healthcare environment and not catch the ire of federal officials, then it's not only a powerfully secure system, but it's also more than enough for less-regulated users.

Avaya's changes to reflect market demand are driving a lot of new developments in open networking, and it's showing that it's ready to make the changes and come out on the other side, better able to compete and deliver the solutions that customers most want to see.