UPDATED 15:41 EDT / JANUARY 29 2014

NEWS

SDN has the potential to deliver benefits like x86 virtualization | #VTUG

The single platform virtualization infrastructure is a thing of the past. Today, IT administrators are leveraging various virtualization platforms to reduce costs and manage workloads. Virtual networking has been called by some the next big thing in the industry. Chris Harney, the founder and president of Virtual Technology Users Group (VTUG) appeared on theCUBE at the recently concluded VTUG Winter Warmer 2014 meeting to discuss how organizations can best optimize heterogeneous virtual environments for SDN, server virtualization, cloud computing, management and storage.

Harney said about a decade ago hypervisors let servers more efficiently utilize compute resources by creating virtual machines and VMware led the industry at that time. There’s still some apprehension to go all in with virtual networking and VMware is trying to perhaps speed things. The company last year spent $1.2 billion to buy Nicira, one of the leader of virtual networking movement.

“Competition breeds better prices, it breeds better features,” Harney explains. “So if you don’t have competition, why is there a reason to innovate? Having all these hypervisors I think is much better for the community, it’s much better for the industry, not only financially but also [in terms of] all the options you have available now. I don’t know if VMware would have bought Nicira if there wasn’t competition breathing down their door.”

Virtualization and SDN take over

The software-defined data center is one where all infrastructure has been virtualized, and the management of that infrastructure is completely controlled by software that is driven by policies. What this emerging trend is essentially doing is taking what has happened over the last 15 years with server virtualization and bringing that to the network and storage levels.

This is evident in the recent popularity of software-defined networking, where Cisco, Broadcom, Riverbed and other prominent vendors started concentrating more on SDN. Last year, Riverbed announced a suite of new tools provided to developers that will greatly enhance their ability to perform DevOps duties. The company unveiled FlyScript — a software-defined scripting language for acting on networking and a highly integrated developer community called Splash.

SDN has the potential to disrupt the traditional power structure in the networking industry. Today, people know what network virtualization is and now they want to know how they can implement it. The enterprise market is going to take a bit longer to come around. But, VMware highlighting early customer wins is an important key to proving out this technology’s functionality.

“What I’m seeing in software-defined is your service providers, Amazon, Microsoft – they are adopting software-defined networking very highly, and that’s the first step,” he observes. “Now, all of your IT companies would like to see themselves as service providers, so I see them adopting software-defined networking 2 or 3 years down the road, but they’re waiting for a true leader. VMware claims to be a software-defined networking company, Cisco claims to be, but there’s no clear leader so no one is betting on a horse yet.”

Harney said perhaps most important, the SDN will finally allow the IT organization to shift resources away from operations and towards helping the mission respond to changing business needs. He added SDN will eventually find its way into traditional IT shops, where applications can dynamically use network resources based on the application’s needs.

VTUG Winter Warmer 2014, TheCube: Stu Miniman, Chris Haney, and Dave Vellante (left-to-right)

Virtual networking can be an opportunity to actually improve network

One area he expects to see future development in is around high-level networking functionality being controlled by SDN controllers. He explains SDN can be an opportunity to actually improve network computationally intensive workloads. He explains the ability to even broader deployment across the organization – eliminating the need for a lot of the duplicate infrastructure that is in place today.

As more and more devices, sensors and objects connect to the Internet and each other, it will create an enormous amount of network connections. More interestingly, these connected objects will collectively generate vast amounts of unstructured data. These billions of connected devices will provide a continuous stream of real-time data over the network. These large data sets will play a key paradigms for data center networks, computing and storage.


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU