Technology has come a long way in the world of business communications over the last decade and, along with the products and services themselves, the way we network has evolved too.
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Virtual1 CTO, James Hickman[/caption]
In order to find out more about what kind of impact digital transformation has had on business networking and to find out why the SDN market is set to reach $35billion by 2018, we decided to get in touch with one of the UK’s most advanced wholesale carriers, Virtual1, and see what their CTO, James Hickman, had to say about these changes.
As a starting point, one of the first things we wanted to discuss was how networking has evolved over the last decade and how much of an impact SDN has had on that marketplace as a result.
In response, along with a huge increase in demand for greater bandwidth, Hickman also informed us of the difficulties many service providers now face as a result of the huge number of vendors who have begun developing their own software management systems for the services they provide.
As a result, infrastructures are becoming increasingly flooded with a mixture of many different types of complex technologies that are notoriously difficult to manage on a traditional network alone.
However, according to Hickman, recent developments within the open source community have given us insights into ways of doing things differently and this innovation challenges these big vendors who have had to adapt their models accordingly.
“What we are seeing now is that vendors such as Cisco - who were once known predominantly as hardware developers - have begun focusing the bulk of their attention on developing software-based solutions to keep up with that open API innovation.”
In a sense, SDN offers better build and control systems, which enables service providers to very rapidly deploy services via a point and click approach that massively simplifies the process and minimises the risk of human error.
Next, we thought it would be a good idea to ask Hickman about current software leaders in the market and if there were any vendors out there that were really shining through and, if so, how SDN has enabled them to accomplish this.
“SDN makes it easier to control systems - before it was all about giving highly skilled engineers having direct access to equipment and doing lots of things using obscure commands, now it’s all about having orchestration layers on top of that and making those features available to end customers and users.”
According to Hickman, Juniper Networks are a key example of a vendor that recognised early on that the complexity of how network systems are built were going to be a major obstacle in the way of their future success.
However, Juniper instead chose to deploy through a hierarchy of services, thus making it easier to drop new elements of config in at different stages and modify the same device from multiple sources - so you can, for example, have lots of engineers working on the same router without being locked out of the device.
“In comparison to Cisco, where it is very easy to lock yourself out of a device when writing config, Juniper enables developers to create a candidate, commit the config later on and roll back if they need to. As a result, they end up having much more flexibility with regards to how they approach the config and it makes it much easier to do automation because they can simply talk to the relevant piece of config they want to change.”
As we can see, these new standards that have evolved through the open APIs are drastically changing the way things are done and traditional ports and interfaces are very much dying out as a result. Instead, modern networks now require a single point controlling system that can talk to lots of different vendors devices, and this has always been the aim of software defined networking movement.
Given that Virtual1 resell their networking through channel partners, we asked Hickman what effect this change would have on them, whether or not they would have to re-learn technologies and what Virtual1 as a company have done to address that issue.
