Open Network Featured Article

In the enterprise world, it’s easy to think of technology as a luxury – something that allows us to streamline the activities we need to accomplish so as to reduce the amount of manual tasks that need to be completed. Over time, we come to realize that this streamlining also means improved efficiencies, which are healthy for the bottom line. When open networking is added to the mix, we can also experience network flexibility that improves overall outcomes.

With this improvement comes greater demand for accessibility to efficient technology solutions. But how do you select the right solution to meet your needs, especially in an open networking environment? Software-defined networking continues to pop up in conversation, but not everyone understands the value or where it can be used to deliver on expressed promises. A recent Tech Target (News - Alert) piece explores specific use cases for this approach where companies can benefit today.

Video continues to grow as a dominant communication tool for collaboration and marketing. Tech Target’s cited use case comes from Sonus Networks (News - Alert), which combined its session border controllers with Juniper’s network virtualization platform. This SDN use case shows applications for video and collaboration to allow providers to create capacity on demand for specific communications sessions and control Quality of Service.

Converged storage is also gaining momentum, and data services provider Edgenet is relying on SDN to create a programmable fabric throughout storage and data center technologies. The company’s goal in selecting SDN was to virtualize the network and make it agile enough to keep server and storage virtualization. Now, Edgenet is offering both data services and Software as a Service, as well as a fully converged storage and data center network.

A group of organizations in Atlanta created an SDN-based networking exchange to allow carriers, enterprises and research institutes the opportunity to interconnect physical networks through the use of SDN. Members can also stretch segments of the virtual network across multiple physical domains where the policy is intact, allowing them to form a private Internet Layer 2 interconnect. The main goal is to eventually allow large institutions and enterprises the opportunity avoid the use of the public Internet.

Mobile operators are also looking for ways to streamline operations through open networking and SDN opportunities. The primary focus as of late has been both SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) as the technologies can enable service and resource orchestration with dynamic provisioning that will take only minutes instead of months to execute. This level of technology addresses challenges through dynamic resource orchestration and intelligent service orchestration.

Finally, SDN switches are in use at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Ocean Cluster for Experimental Architectures in Networks to test a new data-center architecture. This new approach is designed to allow engineers to incrementally scale bandwidth between servers without spending significant amounts of money on hardware. To do so, the organization installed 13 Pica8 switches for a total of 670 ports, all of which act like a large data center network to create a test bed for a range of SDN applications.

It truly is an exciting time in open networking as a number of applications are being developed and tested for smarter operations. The more activity that happens on that end, the better outcomes turned into solutions to improve overall operations.