Wednesday, September 03, 2014: Are you taking a leap to SDN? Then know everything before you jump. You should know what SDN is, what it can do for you and how an SDN controller works. You should also know about your network, if it's able to support SDN or not. Here are 10 tips and tricks which will guide you to prepare for using SDN:
1. Proper Education:
There are several organisations who don't even know what is software-defined networking or SDN and how can they benefit from it. So familiarity is the key to understand how SDN works or can also obstruct your enterprise network. The benefits are regularly touted by Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Amazon but these are not mainstream organisations. They are not the main focus in computing and networking, quite obviously. If you educate yourself about what's trending on SDN and so on then you can find a definition on your own too.
2. You should know what you want to do:
You should be very clear about your organisation's functional areas and networking scopes. You should also know what kind of networking you are looking for, should it be decentralised or distributed control panel. You should be very well aware of SDN applications like analytics and packet monitoring or TAP. Your capital as well as operational expenses can be easily saved if you automate the network through the software. So first set your goal or objective and then implement SDN accordingly.
3. Security implications:
Life of a network operator can be made easier through centralising the control of the SDN. But there can be catastrophic failure too at a point of time when a hack or cyber attack becomes mostly possible. So a controller should know how to deal with this kind of failure or re-routing of traffic. The controller should know how to get rid off a hacker and save the network from falling to knees.
4. Plan first and then start:
SDN used to target data centers initially where most of the orchestration, automation and the likes are possible. But now SDN mostly focus on the enterprise WAN. WANs also benefit from automation and SDN's management skills. WAN now require more security, higher dependency and support in any location for any device. SDNs help IT enterprises in accomplishing this aim without expenses of upgrading individual WAN links.
5. Know how to start:
Experts say always start on a small scale. You should test first and use a section of the development network for your SDN experimentation. If anything goes wrong, you can at least save the rest of the production network. If things look nice for you then you can use SDN on your entire production network. When things are running smoothly SDN facilitates the combination of development and operation networks into a single DevOps environment. Here new capabilities can be switched to production if they the development and testing is done.
6. Proper evaluation of vendors:
The major, established vendors and their SDN/programmable network offerings should be there in your knowledge book. These offerings include Cisco's Application Centric Infrastructure, VMware's NSX, HP's Virtual Application Networks, Juniper's Contrail and more. You should know their differences in physical/virtual underlays, network virtualization overlays, OpenFlow-based forwarding and flow management and alos their similarities. Check your application ecosystems to find solutions to your problems.
7. Open Source and whitebox offerings to be checked:
This procedure works for Google. They find a lot of solutions in hardware and software, including open source software. The OpenDaylight Project developed an open source SDN framework from the code of multiple established vendors. But Google and its likes all over the world add a lot of their personal views and use all this stuff together. Open source and whitebox switches may help the SDN task but designing, installing, managing, operating – everything needs to be done by you only.
8. Go through start-up offerings:
Cumulus is a start-up which has an exciting open source/whitebox proposition involving a Linux OS for networking on bare metal switches. This practice cuts down the expense of data center networking and with Dell as a partner customers can now get a data center giant's service and support too. Enterprises should be wise enough to consider advanced technologies in start-ups for using SDNs.
9. SDN controller's functionality check:
You need to know what to look for in an SDN controller. The controller's performance, capacity, capability and other qualities need to go through the check. But the networks should also remain in proper knowledge for the enterprises which use SDN.
10. Existing network's impact:
It was observed by University of Pittsburgh Medical Center that its existing network was not performing when moving virtual machines were around. So an SDN private cloud was used. Most SDNs are likely to require wholesale upgrades to networks which are more than five years old. SDN is leaving many old switches behind with the likes of Cisco and Juniper.
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