Maintaining Visibility Amidst 2016 Software-Defined Networking Trends

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.

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