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Take 5 with Caroline Chappell
CEN Feature (Jan 7 2014) Take Five With
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Caroline Chappell, senior analyst for Heavy Reading, leads her firm's research into service provider cloud adoption for internal IT, enterprise service delivery and network functions virtualization (NFV). She also covers the impact of software-defined networking (SDN) and NFV on telecom providers. Carrier Ethernet News took the opportunity to talk with Caroline about the findings in her 2013 reports and and the impact NFV and SDN are having on Carrier Ethernet service providers in the near- and long-term.
CEN: Overall, how will SDN & NFV impact Carrier Ethernet networks, service providers and the services being deployed today?CC: SDN is not going to, necessarily, straight away. SDN is going into the data center first and it will probably take a couple of years before it hits the wide area network (WAN). That's the point when it will start affecting Carrier Ethernet.
However, a lot depends on how you define SDN. There are really two aspects. One definition is being applied to the network management side, the move towards adopting management systems that provide high levels of abstraction that make networks easier to configure automatically, and therefore more ‘programmable.’ If you have that definition of SDN, then yes, Carrier Ethernet providers are being affected by ‘SDN’-based network management today, because they have got to accelerate the provisioning time of their networks. That is becoming a competitive differentiator.
If you are talking about SDN-based routing in the WAN, that is still some way off because the OpenFlow style of networking is unlikely to go into the WAN anytime soon. There are other control planes and protocols in the WAN that most operators don’t want to rip and replace immediately.
I was at an Alcatel-Lucent event a couple of weeks ago where the distinction between SDN as management and SDN as routing was made very nicely. SDN as management will have an impact sooner rather than later because customers want bandwidth on demand and telcos to provision VPN services much faster. This is especially true for telcos that are looking to become power providers, they really have to up their game there. From that point of view, network management systems that provide SDN-like capabilities are going to have a big impact sooner rather than later.
However, if you talk about SDN as routing, this is starting to take place in the data center today. But the SDN solutions that telcos are putting in place in their data centers have to link to the WAN-based virtual private network (VPN) services they are delivering to enterprise customers in use cases where a telco wants to provide end-to-end connectivity from the customer premises to a customer ‘slice’ of its data center infrastructure and/or cloud. Eventually, SDN-based data center networking and WAN VPNs may well converge.
CEN: What about NFV?
CC: Again it depends on what layer you are talking about. If you are talking about very large core routers in the network, NFV is not going to have much of an impact, because those routers are probably going to stay unvirtualized for the time being. Eventually SDN-based routing controllers will also be virtualized. Route reflectors are already being virtualized. But NFV is really starting to affect Layer 4 – 7 services. For Carrier Ethernet at Layer 2, the impact will be minimal, but that depends on what you consider to be part of your Carrier Ethernet service. If you are bundling in Layer 4-7 services, they may well be virtualized.
Some of the edge routers may be virtualized, but then again, routing is not necessarily where people are starting with NFV.
CEN: Why is NFV more pronounced in Layers 4-7?
CC: Because those layers are easier to virtualize. Some are virtualized already. We have had virtualized versions of firewalls and load balancers for at least three years. Content delivery is another area where there is big interest in virtualization. From an economic perspective, Layer 4-7 services are at the edge, so they are expensive to deploy because you need so many boxes for coverage. You also have fewer customers than for core routing and the services often have to be customized for individual clients. So you don't have the same economies of scale that you do with core routers, which are produced in volume because there is greater demand. If Layer 4-7 services are virtualized, they are cheaper to deploy so the economics make sense.
CEN: So NFV will be more important to Carrier Ethernet providers that offer their customers a wider range of services than others?
CC: Yes. Service providers that want to provide security services, WAN optimization and IP address translation, etc. for which there is less demand than for core Ethernet services will benefit. They will be able to place virtualized versions at the edge where customers need them. A large U.S. carrier I talked to found that its budget would only buy it presence in two U.S. cities if it used firewall appliances, but the same budget enabled it to roll virtualized security services out to 16 cities. With NFV you can offer services more easily to more customers and offer more customization. That's why these services are being virtualized first.
CEN: Do Carrier Ethernet, SDN and NFV complement each other?CC: They do because Ethernet is rapidly becoming the key connectivity technology for enterprise customers. NFV enables telcos to enrich their Carrier Ethernet services cost-effectively and SDN concepts help them deliver such services faster and more efficiently. Since the virtualized network functions that telcos want to offer as part of their carrier Ethernet portfolio run in carrier data centers, SDN routing helps in the delivery of those functions-as-services. And eventually, SDN-based routing may underpin everything in the network.
CEN: How will customers benefit. I've been hearing about disaster recovery applications quite a bit, lately?
CC: If as a telco, you control Layer 2 and Layer 3 connections to the customer, then you have a great opportunity to link the customer to your cloud services in a way that makes them look as though they are running natively in the customer's network.
This contrasts with the way that enterprises have to connect to the Amazon cloud today, where they have to go through firewalls and managing everything differently in AWS. With a virtual private line service, (VPLS) from an Ethernet service provider, an enterprise can use that service provider’s cloud/data center as though it’s just another node on its VPLS network.
This tends to be the point at which enterprises really ‘get’ the value of using carrier cloud and start to say, "that's what we want." The service providers I talk to that have added cloud to their Carrier Ethernet portfolios are seeing a large growth opportunity here.
And you can start to offer cloud-based disaster recovery services, security services or enterprise applications here, enabled by the network. But, you have to have the capability to automate the delivery of network connectivity underneath, both within the data center and across the WAN to the customer premises. Which takes us back to the importance of both definitions of SDN.
CEN: Some providers are on they way to that.
CC: Yes, they are on the way to using SDN, but they are not necessarily using OpenFlow SDN. However, they have abstracted and automated their networks so that through application programming interfaces (APIs) they can do very rapid, and ‘programmable’ service provisioning – without having large numbers of people go out and manually configure command line interfaces. Telcos can do this today with the right investment in network management systems that apply an SDN-like approach to the existing, physical network. This will help them become more agile where network service delivery is concerned without going through the disruption of adopting OpenFlow-based routing – which is, in any case, not possible yet in the WAN.
CEN: If you are one of our readers and you are not on the management track, why aren't you doing it now? Is this for carriers small and large?
CC: Telcos that are not yet doing this may not be in highly competitive markets for Carrier Ethernet services or enterprise cloud services may be a sideline for them so they are not investing in differentiating them through their networks. This is not just a large telco game. I know of $20 million telcos that don't even own their own data centers, but they have built a strong cloud offer that leverages their VPLS services. They are using NFV and are evaluating SDN routing solutions for their cloud. If they can exploit these technologies, it's not a question of size. Actually smaller telcos can be more nimble and they are often getting cloud right and adopting SDN and NFV faster than the larger companies. However, all large Tier 1 operators with serious global enterprise cloud businesses are working on SDN and NFV right now.
CEN: So we should be hearing quite a bit about this in 2014?
CC: Yes, we will. At the Light Reading Ethernet and SDN Expo in October, we had standing room only in our session on new approaches to network management driven by SDN and NFV. Telcos are going to have to invest in this area now to lower operational costs and streamline service delivery if they want to remain competitive.
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Recent Comments
laurabicom » CLECs to ILECs: Don't hang up your copper networks!
Good article, thanks for posting. We also have an article on CLEC: http://blog.bicomsystems.com/clec
asadnaveed » Guest Commentary: Carrier Ethernet APAC Conference
I also had the honor to participate in the Conference. I spoke on the topic ...
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