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Maintaining Visibility Amidst 2016 Software-Defined Networking Trends

January 7, 2016

Software Defined Networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) offers cost-cutting, performance and security benefits that businesses gravitated toward in 2015. However, SDN is constantly changing and you must be prepared to maintain 100% traffic capturing, filtering, aggregating and balancing as the technology evolves.

Staying ahead of 2016’s SDN trends is the only way to avoid deployments that introduce holes that make your network more susceptible to data breaches and network intrusions.

Four Key Trends for SDN in 2016

Dan Pitt, Executive Director of the Open Networking Foundation, recently revealed his key predictions for SDN in 2016. Understanding these points can make a major difference as you centralize your data center controls and deploy software-based automation across your network in the coming year.

  • Shifting Focus to Northbound Interfaces (NBIs): SDN innovators have generally focused on southbound interfaces-ensuring the SDN controller and network nodes communication, allowing routers to discover network topology, define network flows and implement requests relayed by northbound interfaces. In 2016, Pitt predicts that NBIs will get the open source treatment for applications like real-time media and operating environments. These open source NBIs will create a foundation for programming the network and application portability. 
  • Commercialization of Open Source: Despite a universal desire to achieve high flexibility in dictating switches, routers and network subsystems, developing open source solutions that satisfy everyone’s needs has been challenging to say the least. Pitt predicts more widespread use of SDN-based enterprise production applications throughout the SDN community in 2016.
  • Global Service Provider Adoption: SDN has been gaining momentum slowly, but Pitt believes 2016 will bring greater worldwide adoption—especially in Asian markets. Service providers are seeing the benefits of more modest network functions virtualization (NFV) deployments and they’ll begin to disaggregate their operations support systems for greater SDN adoption.
  • SDN and NFV will Begin to Join Forces: Pitt recognizes that carriers have ramped up their NFV deployments for greater network flexibility. However, he notes that more impactful NFV changes require underlying SDN components. The biggest NFV demand is for service function chaining in the control plane—something that can only be achieved with an SDN foundation.

 

Learn more about SDN and NFV!

Keeping Up with SDN in 2016 Without Losing Visibility

SDN has received a lot of hype over the years, but one thing is certain—getting started with SDN is often easier said than done. However, Big Switch Networks develops SDN fabrics built to meet modern bandwidth and traffic demands to bring hyperscale data center networking to a mainstream audience.

While Big Switch Networks SDN fabrics can replicate switches and load balancers, we’ve discussed why a visibility plane for network monitoring tools is still essential for successful SDN deployment. Understanding their mutual interest in this space, Big Switch Networks and Garland Technology partnered to create a joint data center visibility and security solution—one that leverages Garland’s 10G, 40G and 100G network TAPs and Big Switch Networks’ Big Monitoring Fabric™ for high performance data centers and mobile data networks.

Legacy network packet brokers won’t be able to support growing SDN traffic and bandwidth demands with 100% visibility—especially as Dan Pitt’s predictions come to fruition in 2016. Multiple Fortune 500 customers have recognized the Big Switch Networks/Garland Technology joint solution’s ability to quickly scale the monitoring infrastructure unlike other SDN platforms, investing in the multi-tenant solution as a result. Both Big Switch Networks and Garland technology are committed to providing accessible, operationally simple, highly scalable and cost-effective SDN solutions for high-performance data centers.

If you want to learn more about the Big Switch Networks/Garland Technology joint solution, visit their partnership page.

If you want to learn more about the promises of SDN, NFV and the importance of maintaining 100% network visibility as you make the transition, download our free white paper, Architecting Data Centers for SDN and NFV - In 40G and 100G Environments

 

See Everything. Secure Everything.

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Heartbeats Packets Inside the Bypass TAP

If the inline security tool goes off-line, the TAP will bypass the tool and automatically keep the link flowing. The Bypass TAP does this by sending heartbeat packets to the inline security tool. As long as the inline security tool is on-line, the heartbeat packets will be returned to the TAP, and the link traffic will continue to flow through the inline security tool.

If the heartbeat packets are not returned to the TAP (indicating that the inline security tool has gone off-line), the TAP will automatically 'bypass' the inline security tool and keep the link traffic flowing. The TAP also removes the heartbeat packets before sending the network traffic back onto the critical link.

While the TAP is in bypass mode, it continues to send heartbeat packets out to the inline security tool so that once the tool is back on-line, it will begin returning the heartbeat packets back to the TAP indicating that the tool is ready to go back to work. The TAP will then direct the network traffic back through the inline security tool along with the heartbeat packets placing the tool back inline.

Some of you may have noticed a flaw in the logic behind this solution!  You say, “What if the TAP should fail because it is also in-line? Then the link will also fail!” The TAP would now be considered a point of failure. That is a good catch – but in our blog on Bypass vs. Failsafe, I explained that if a TAP were to fail or lose power, it must provide failsafe protection to the link it is attached to. So our network TAP will go into Failsafe mode keeping the link flowing.

Glossary

  1. Single point of failure: a risk to an IT network if one part of the system brings down a larger part of the entire system.

  2. Heartbeat packet: a soft detection technology that monitors the health of inline appliances. Read the heartbeat packet blog here.

  3. Critical link: the connection between two or more network devices or appliances that if the connection fails then the network is disrupted.

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