There are many factors contributing to the adoption behavior surrounding software-defined networking, from mobile devices in the workplace to virtualization trends. But cost remains the primary consideration for most organizations, and automation can keep IT departments on budget, according to Paul Unbehagen, co-author of the Shortest Path Bridging protocol for optimizing data center traffic and the chief architect at Avaya Networking Inc., an emerging provider of programmable networking solutions.

This pursuit of cost savings is driving a long overdue transformation in the corporate network that is seeing the  need for manual intervention rapidly go down as software takes over tasks previously carried out by humans. A key figures behind the transition, Unbehagen made his debut appearance on theCUBE at the Peer 2.0 engineering summit last week to share the insider take on the paradigm shift taking place today with hosts John Furrier and Jeff Frick.

The  accelerating migration from legacy topologies to robust new architectures that combine commodity equipment with free software is the result of several disruptive trends converging in a “perfect storm” scenario, according to Unbehagen, raising the need for organizations to rethink how they build and run their networks.

“For the last 20 years, we’ve been using the same protocols to operate a network that’s been very static when everything connected to this is dynamic, moving around,”  he explained. “In the original networking models, you didn’t like things moving around, you wanted things to stay where they were, and now you have to deal with things that are mobile.”

Money drives SDN, automation resolves it

Unbehagen named proliferation of connected devices in the workplace as one contributing factor, and pointed at the near-ubiquitous adoption of virtualization as another. But those individual phenomena are merely pieces in the puzzle. The way he sees it,  the underlying reason organizations are adopting software-defined networking (SDN) is a lot more straightforward.  “It’s money, it’s budget,” he detailed. “Every environment I know is having an issue where their budget is shrinking and they’re asked to do more every year.”

The key to bringing down the costs of operating networks is automation, a special focus that Unbehagen said unifies all the different definitions and  implementations of SDN out there today, among them Avaya’s. But that is not to say lowered overhead is the only benefit of reduced human involvement. Taking the hassle out of configuring and provisioning of the underlying infrastructure also helps facilitate new use cases that were previously too complex – and by extension too expensive – to pull off.

“A lot of people think of the data center as being this big building off to the site, but you’re gonna see smaller off-site environments become arms off the data center where I can move VMs [virtual machines] closer to users for improved experience,” Unbehagen detailed Shortening the physical distance between the server and the client enables  much faster response times bordering on real-time, a term that means different things to different people but carries the same set of requirements on the operational side.

“A doctor’s got a completely different set of expectations about real-time applications compared to a stock trader,” he explained. “You ask them what real-time is, they’re gonna have completely different definitions, and if you can’t meet it, you got a problem. But solving it comes down to very similar problem sets: it’s the quality of the network, it’s the quality of the application, it’s the quality of the experience.”

That’s where analytics, another element in the “perfect storm of innovation” sweeping through the industry, comes in. Unbehagen highlighted that the ability to gain a complete understanding of infrastructure and =predict issues before they affect end-users allows organizations to turn their network strategies from reactive to proactive, thereby facilitating real-time applications for a variety of users across different industries.

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