{"id":30743,"date":"2018-01-19T10:54:34","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T02:54:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/?p=30743"},"modified":"2018-01-19T10:54:34","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T02:54:34","slug":"software-defined-everything-moving-from-simple-virtualization-to-business-critical-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.upgrademag.com\/web\/2018\/01\/19\/software-defined-everything-moving-from-simple-virtualization-to-business-critical-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Software defined everything: Moving from simple virtualization to business-critical services"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Erin Dunne, director of research services of Vertical Systems Group.<\/p><\/div>\n

Virtualization and software-defined networks should be a means to an end \u2014 not an end to itself. The goal of a data center, after all, is to deliver services (such as applications and microservices) to end users or to drive business processes. It doesn\u2019t matter if those applications run on physical servers or virtual servers or in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) or containers \u2013 the goal is to deliver those services.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take a step back. Of course, it matters if those applications run on physical or virtual servers; on-prem or in the cloud; or on traditional or software-defined networks. The technology is still evolving, and so are the offerings of service providers, who are scrambling over each other to find new ways of efficiently turning rigid systems into virtualized software-defined systems at every level.<\/p>\n

According to Erin Dunne, director of research at Vertical Systems Group<\/a>, it\u2019s helpful to define the services that IT wants to deliver as customer-facing services \u2014 something an end-user customer or business customer finds valuable, and is willing to pay for.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat’s key,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause the enterprise customer is the beginning of a value chain. If the vendors, the service providers, develop OpEx reducing technologies, and that’s all it does is reduce OpEx, that’s fine, but is that sustainable? Probably not. They need someone to pay for the applications.\u201d<\/p>\n

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IMAGE FROM PIXABAY.COM<\/p><\/div>\n

The complexity kicks in when those services become more complex and dynamic, Dunne added, requiring orchestration between multiple servers, applications, databases, and even clouds. How do vendors provision those services on the back end? How do they deliver them rapidly? How do they bill for them?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are the most important drivers and challenges that you see when you deploy dynamic and orchestrated services? Pretty much by definition dynamic orchestrated services has to be software enabled, because they just doesn’t work in the legacy infrastructure,\u201d she said. Such services need \u201cfaster service provisioning, rapid adjustments to existing services, and the ability to scale bandwidth quickly, sometimes instantaneously.\u201d<\/p>\n

With deployment, Dunne pointed to questions about \u201chow do you orchestrate, not only over your own network, but over multiple networks including access networks, long haul networks, data centre providers, all of those types of service providers?\u201d Similarly, she explained, are questions about the OSS and the BSS systems. \u201cIf you can’t bill for it, you can’t deploy it. We’re here to make some money!\u201d<\/p>\n

For older companies, Dunne mentioned, there are \u201clegacy infrastructures and legacy services. How do they integrate these new software enabled services with what they already have?\u201d<\/p>\n

Assume the Network is Virtualized<\/h2>\n

Service delivery requires application controls, and effective application controls change how networks operate, said Nick King, Vice President, Cloud Solutions at VMware<\/a>. \u201cWe have to assume that most applications, particularly cloud-oriented applications, will assume the network is virtualized at some level. If the applications are containerized, the control will look at what sort of container runtime system the applications are running on, and that’s usually presented in some sort of virtualized networking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we look at traditional systems where applications are sitting inside our own data centers, can those applications span across both sides,\u201d that is, to the cloud, King asked. \u201cThat’s the big challenge for us. We’ve seen such a quick movement from software-defined to really-broadly-software-defined, like software-defined data centers and networking running into the cloud. That’s really going to shift in a very short amount of time.\u201d<\/p>\n

King also mentioned developing new cloud-native applications \u2013 which are often delivered as services. \u201cIt used to be that you’d build a service and deploy it: The service would live in one location. Today what we’re seeing with Kubernetes and Docker is that applications are living anywhere, and that networking is also changing with that. We have to make the network abstraction happen as fast as possible across on-prem, private clouds, and public clouds on Azure, Google, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n

Align Service Definitions to Business Objectives<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s all about business objectives, said Jeff Baher, Senior Director, Product & Technical Marketing, at Dell<\/a>. \u201cThere is a tendency, when we look at the technologies, to start from the bottom up. With SDN, there was an early focus really on the networking layer, then applying the software, building it up, and software to find storage. Ultimately you get to this top of the stack.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, he said, the end goal is software-defined businesses \u2014 and that\u2019s the best place to start, and then figure out the technologies needed to create that software-defined business. Why don\u2019t we hear more about it? \u201cIt is probably deeply proprietary. If you look at an Uber, or an Ancestor, or Facebook, the software-defined businesses are deeply proprietary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Baher explained that in order for software-defined resources to \u201creally gain traction and roots, it needs to be deeply aligned to what the business objectives are. That’s key to understanding which technologies will matter and how they then get assembled to ultimately drive a business.\u201d<\/p>\n