This past Monday was the opening day for the WAN Summit where 300 or so folk gathered to plumb the future of the WAN. Yours truly was there and hosted a great session (If I say so myself) about Experiences with Adopting SD-WAN and Integrating the Internet into the WAN. We’ll touch that later, but first some insights from Day One.
The Elephant in the Room
We are seeing a complete change of WAN topology and hardware to SD-WAN and x86 processors. Cisco’s lack of attendance here points to their confused SD-WAN Strategy. The news last week that Cisco will offer a network operating system on an x86 processor adds to the confusion, in my opinion.
The Keynote
BT’s Colin Spence keynote looked at how smart networks are changing corporate networks or as he put it SMACIT – Social Mobile Ana
lytics Cloud IoT — are driving the new network leading to richer interactions with customers who are not tied to desks anymore, but can work anywhere with any device.
He expects that 70% of surveyed users will adopt SD-WAN in the next 18 months. The data is from a BT survey of “thousands of CIO and IT decision makers” across 11 countries.
Key drivers are – security, delivering SaaS, and managing connectivity. The cloud is particularly important. Spence noted that 61% said that the cloud is the disruptor, 19% of enterprises are 100% in the cloud, and 46% have moved half of their apps and infrastructure to the cloud.
BT is rolling out SDN controlled VPNs by installing smart boxes at the customer edge. They are building 50 cloud service nodes to run the applications in the cloud. Services will be delivered on demand.
Where’s the Security
During his keynote, Spence flashed up on the screen data gathered from WAN Summit attendees. One of the findings that caught my eye was that only 5 percent are looking at SD-WAN for security.
I’m was a bit surprised given everything we’ve heard about the importance of SD-WANs to security, but then it started to make sense. Very few people are looking at SD-WAN as a means of better securing their WANs (maybe they should, but that’s another matter). Most, in my experience, look closer at security once they’ve deployed or plan on deploying an SD-WAN. “Security is a massive issue when you open up to the internet,” said Spence.
As we’ve pointed out, one of SD-WANs greatest benefit is if cloud- and Internet-bound traffic can exit directly from the remote offices onto the Internet. You avoid the performance problems introduced by backhauling. Of course, that means determining how you’ll secure those distributed access points. Many vendors have added firewalling to their remote devices. Silver Peak’s recent announcement to that effect is probably the latest example. But security experts will tell you that basic firewalling is insufficient if you want to protect against malware, APTs, and other modern day threats. Cloud based solutions, such as Cato’s integrated secure SD-WAN, are more promising.
- SDN, SD-WAN, NFV – Oh, My!
There was a fair amount of definitional work being done in several of the seminars. Ciaron Roche: co founder and CTO of Coevolve
defined the core terms of our industry — SDN, SD-WAN, and NFV in this way: - SDN is the separation of control and data planes to create centrally controlled programmable networks.
- SD-WAN is the loose application of SDN principles to the WAN, creating overlays to program and automate the WAN.
- NFV / VNF is a virtualized task formerly based on proprietary dedicated hardware. NFV is the practice of using VNF.
I might quibble with some of the details or lack thereof with those definitions, but for the most part that sounds about right.
- SDN, SD-WAN, NFV – Oh, My!
SDN is always in the news, but it has little enterprise focus. It applies mostly to carriers and very large enterprises, such as Google. The recent report about Google’s Espresso project is one such example. Espresso reportedly improves application performance by shifting path calculation to servers who instruct edge routers of the ideal path through Google’s network. Espresso is working on 20 percent of Google’s traffic. (You can read more about Espresso here.)
SD-WAN is another story. More than $500 million in venture capital funding was raised in the last five years. More than 25 vendors claim to have SD-WAN. There’s a real interest in the cost savings, by finding the applications that don’t need the expensive MPLS circuits.
