The first impact of open networking in the telecom industry is a tear-down of the traditional purpose-built network appliances, says Chris King, Senior Director - Product Marketing for Oracle. As we think about where this is headed, the hope is that many of the techniques of the IT industry will be adopted to really deliver interoperable software.
OpenStack is fundamentally changing the face of service delivery, say Lew Tucker, Vice President and CTO of Cloud Computing for Cisco. Network providers, media companies, application developers and SaaS providers are all moving towards an open-source, cloud-model based on OpenStack.
This short video also hits on Cisco's role in OpenStack and how Comcast is moving ahead with its OpenStack designs.
An important aspect of New IP and Open Netwoking is the need to put control in the hands of the customer, says Brocade's Kevin Woods, Director of Product Management, Software Networking.
The video discusses Brocade's OpenDaylight controller.
Fujitsu Network Communications has successfully demonstrated interoperability between its Open Source SDN Controller and the ONOS controller developed by ON.Lab.
Fujitsu, a founding ONOS partner, developed TL1 southbound interfaces from the ONOS-based SDN controller to the FLASHWAVE 9500 Packet Optical Networking Platform (P-ONP) to provide Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) services: On-demand bandwidth, bandwidth calendaring and multi-layer optimization.
In this video, Anuj Dutia, Head of Market Development at FNC, presents an overview of the Fujitsu Open Source SDN controller, including a demonstration of dynamic service activation across multiple network layers.
Open is a philosophy that increases the pace of innovation, says Cole Crawford, CEO of Vapor IO, which has recently launched a Linux distribution that provides top-of-rack (TOR) management capabilities for data centers. Open creates a "pull process" as opposed to having technology thrust upon you.
Open source is critical to everything that we do, says Gee Rittenhouse, Senior VP and General Manager of Cisco's Cloud and Virtualization Group.
Three aspects of open source really stand out: first, it ensures that there is no vendor lock-in; second, it accelerates time-to-market; and third, it enables ecosystem communities to emerge. Cisco believes Open Daylight fits into this process at the controller layer.
In today's IT services, "open" is hitting on both sides of the wire -- the mobile side, where employees are seeking a more consumer-like experience on the job, and in the backend data center, says Robin Purohit, President, Service Support, BMC.
There is an increased blending of private cloud and public cloud IT environments.
BMC is reinventing its entire technology stack to fulfill the vision of digital service management.
The cloud ecosystem is expanding at an astonishing pace and Tata Communications is right in the middle it, says Mike Galvin, Vice President, Next Gen.
Tata is focusing on the building blocks for hybrid clouds, including direct connectivity via MPLS or Ethernet to the major public cloud providers. The carrier is also enhancing its global IP backbone to make it fit for business with better predictability and reduced latency. This video interview also highlights Tata's new partnership with Salesforce.
The open networking movement is here to stay. It's not just about open source software, says Shehzad Merchant, CTO of Gigamon, but really about taking a vertically-integrated networking stack and disaggregating it. With various components of the networking stack supplied by different vendors, maintaining visibility across every layer of that stack becomes critical.
By disaggregating the networking stack, you are, in principle, opening up new attack vectors across multiple surfaces. On the other hand, there will be a much broader ecosystem moving much quicker to address vulnerabilities.
To skip ahead to other segments in this video, see below.
A market disruption caused by SDN is shifting margins from the legacy networking vendors to the channel, says Steve Garrison, VP of Marketing at Pica8. By tearing apart the stack and letting customers pick the applications, OS, and bare metal hardware, you end up with a customized solution where the channel has a key role to play.
Many customers might not have that expertise to pull that together, but this is where the margin shifts from the legacy vendors to the channel.
Corsa Technology offers a full, OpenFlow programmable data plane
that delivers performance, flexibility, and scale.
At the recent Open Networking Summit 2015 in Santa Clara, California, Corsa demonstrated its new bandwidth metering and QoS capabilities. Corsa also conducted a multi-vendor packet/optical optimization demonstration, along with a demonstration of the new "Atrium" software release from the ONF.
The first use case for SDN-based metering and QoS involves large data set transfers, such as between major research facilities and super computer labs. Corsa's demo uses OpenFlow 1.3.
Presented by Bruce Gregory, David Whittaker, and Carolyn Raab.
CipherCloud and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) are forming a Cloud Security Open API Working Group to jointly define protocols and best practices for implementing cloud data security as a part of the cloud access security broker (CASB) framework.
The Cloud Security Alliance is an industry coalition for promoting best practices for providing security assurance within cloud computing. CipherCloud offers an open platform for cloud application discovery and risk assessment, data protection – searchable strong encryption, tokenization, data loss prevention, key management and malware detection – along with user activity and anomaly monitoring services.
“Cloud is the killer app for security innovation,” said Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO of CipherCloud. “But currently, inefficiencies at the technical level in the form of custom connector protocols can hold back innovations in cloud security. Defining a uniform set of standards can enable us all to operate from the same playbook. As a pioneer in CASB, we are excited to co-lead this initiative with CSA to accelerate security across clouds.”
In this video, Chenxi Wang talks about the need for cloud security open APIs as a means to govern how data is accessed, classified and protected within cloud applications. The reason for cloud security open APIs is that everyone will benefit by a wider pool of contributors.
The whole Open Networking revolution is really about transforming how infrastructure is built, and changing the dynamics from switches and protocols to the business applications, says Kumar Srikantan, President and CEO of Pluribus Networks.
If you think about this, it's no different that what has happened in the world of mobile devices. Android and iOS are not really about mobile telephony but rather a platform for other applications.
Open networking is all about enabling the next generation of applications.
Open is the way to innovate in your network, says Guido Appenzeller, Chief Technology Strategy Officer for VMware's Network & Security business unit.
If you go back 15 years, servers were closed too. Today, there are many choices for servers and it only takes a few clicks to spin-up a new VMs. Networks need this same DevOps mindset. The ability to pick the software that runs your network independently of the hardware is a huge step forward and will usher in the 'golden age of networking.'
Open networking is driven by sound economics, says ClearPath Networks' Cliff Young.
To head off the over-the-top challenge, network operators need solutions that are much more interoperable, much more flexible and much more software-defined.
Clearpath is excited about OPNFV as the common platform for service providers. Virtual CPE offers the potential to extend network functions directly to the customer.
Customers love open... but "open" has many different flavors and varieties, says Dan Pitt, Executive Director of the Open Networking Foundation.
"We've been strong advocates of open SDN for a long time. "
"
By open, we mean not just published, but not controlled by a single party. It is good that people are opening up and publishing. There are open standards, open specifications, and open interfaces. It is important that they be community-defined."
Open networking brings experts from across the industry together to focus on common problems, says Stuart Elby, SVP, Data Center Business Group at Infinera. This leads to faster time-to-market, more use cases, and more security, as more eyes can look out for vulnerabilities.
Disruptive innovations first occur through proprietary solutions but are later subsumed by the open source community. We are on the verge of seeing that for SDN and NFV.
Everything that can be virtualized will be virtualized. However, no one has figured out how to virtualize photons. This means there are still real optical layer with photons moving through ROADMs, transponders and amplifiers.
The big challenge is solving network complexity, says Ram Appalaraju, Executive Advisor to ONS.
It's come to the point where we need the entire community to put its weight behind open source projects. There are several open networking initiatives at play here. The minimum bar is extracting the control plane from the data traffic, but beyond that customers are expecting very high scalability, high throughput etc.
Over the last few years there has been a major shift in networking with the arrival of SDN and NFV, says Prodip Sen, CTO of Network Functions Virtualization for HP.
The transformation underway in telecom networks is occurring pretty much like what happened in data centers, says Sen, where many companies collaborate on open source projects.
Huawei is a big backer of OpenStack and Open DayLight, says Jane Li, Chief Operating Officer for Huawei Enterprise USA. Here she discusses the rollout of the company's flagship data center switch, the development of the SDN market, and her company's strategic vision for SDN.
by Vishwanath Ramachandran, Principal Consultant, Communications Vertical Group – Tech Mahindra
Big Data Analytics was meant to be the panacea to attain the next big leap for growth, innovation, new streams of revenue and productivity. Many businesses are storing data that could form the basis for strategic decisions and planning. However, organizations are astonished to see the enormity of the large amount of both structured and unstructured data from across the entire organization. This data can be arranged in so many different ways, combined, compared and examined to find patterns and organized into meaningful information.
Capitalizing on the opportunities presented by Big Data entails the co-ordination of a number of cultural, organizational and technological facets. Synchronizing, harmonizing and harnessing these elements in support of business objectives require that IT departments are closely aligned with long-term business plans. Business operations for CSPs can benefit manifold with application of Data Analytics in their complex environment. From a customer experience and business operations perspective, proactive monitoring of hundreds of systems in real-time can prevent potential IT failures through timely alerts and minimal human effort or intervention. Real-time visibility into systems health helps CSPs deliver higher quality of service.
Opportunities in Big Data for Communication Service Providers
CSPs with increasing consumer focus will require next-generation analytics to combine data from both the legacy and Big Data environments. They need to transform this data into deep insights based on subscriber’s frequency of consumption of data and usage and spend patterns for applications. This presents the opportunity to improve marketing programs and campaigns for cross-selling and up-selling products and services, as well as to increase customer stickiness.
CSPs might also utilise their Big Data capabilities for forecasting customer lifetime value. This foresight can help them to develop personalized product and service offering bundles. With data anonymisation, CSPs would be well positioned to monetize customer intelligence as retail and research organizations will be more than happy to pay for accurate and relevant information. It is interesting to note that one of the CSPs in Africa have put to use big data to determine the behavioural pattern of the various citizens in different part of Africa and then anonymise this data for marketers to potentially use this for their services.
Big Data is a strategic activity and requires CXO direction and alignment. While many executives go with anecdotal evidences, the discipline to accept objective data and take appropriate action is vital. Falling back on conventional knowledge, insights and past experiences may delay responses and the real benefit is lost. Agility is really the key here. It is imperative to understand the importance of the special skills required. Big Data is not a single technology. Hence the skills required to handle it cannot be acquired in silos and traditional learning and development methods for skill upgrade do not do justice to the cause. Big Data initiatives can be implemented by teams having a right mix of experts such as data scientists, reporting and analytics experts, developers, system and infrastructure analysts, domain and technology experts, solution architects and data integrators.
The growing importance of Big Data applications across the value chain in Communication business cannot be ignored today. However, it is widely observed that CSPs are still in the early stages of adoption. Areas beyond IT, such as, customer care, sales, marketing and network operations are gaining much traction. CSPs need to do away with the siloed approach in their value chain and also change their attitude towards Big Data to make most of the benefits this technology promises, especially with the automation of Big Data applications to bring in efficiency and agility. They also need to have complete confidence in their data sources and related systems to ensure that Big Data is leveraged to its maximum potential. There is also a need to create a balance between being sensitive to customer problems and privacy as a regulatory requirement, while at the same time ensuring that business operations and upcoming opportunities are not missed.
About the Author
(Vish) Vishwanath Ramachandran is Principal Consultant, Communications Vertical, Tech Mahindra
Vish has over 22 years of experience in IT services in the areas of Practice management, Program / Delivery management, Business consulting, Process redesign, Change management, Quality management and Software engineering.
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Microsoft announced several new Azure networking services and features, including expanded ExpressRoute connectivity to other Microsoft Cloud services like Office 365 and Skype for Business Enterprise Voice. Some of the new features include: Standard VPN gateway enabling Site-to-Site (S2S) connectivity to a Virtual Network that also has a gateway connected to an ExpressRoute circuit.
Microsoft announced several new Azure networking services and features, including expanded ExpressRoute connectivity to other Microsoft Cloud services like Office 365 and Skype for Business Enterprise Voice. Some of the new features include: Standard VPN gateway enabling Site-to-Site (S2S) connectivity to a Virtual Network that also has a gateway connected to an ExpressRoute circuit.
A new version of the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), named Blackbird, has been released (the first version of ONOS was out in December 2014).
ONOS features a highly available, scalable SDN control plane featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control, and service applications across mission critical networks. It is architected as a distributed but logically centralized control plane to achieve high performance, scale-out and high availability. ONOS' high availability characteristics include full recovery from events such as switch and link failure, node failure, entire ONOS cluster failure, single node cluster failure, cluster partitioning and device-node communication failure.
The ONOS Blackbird release defines the following set of metrics to effectively measure performance and other carrier-grade attributes of the SDN control plane.
The latest version of the Open Network Operating System (ONOS), which is named Blackbird, features a highly available, scalable SDN control plane featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control, and service applications across mission critical networks. It is architected as a distributed but logically centralized control plane to achieve high performance, scale-out and high availability. ONOS' high availability characteristics include full recovery from events such as switch and link failure, node failure, entire ONOS cluster failure, single node cluster failure, cluster partitioning and device-node communication failure.
The ONOS Blackbird release defines the following set of metrics to effectively measure performance and other carrier-grade attributes of the SDN control plane.
Guru Parulkar, Executive Director of ON.Lab, breaks down the various open communities involved in next gen networking, including the Open Network Foundation, ON.Lab, and Open DayLight.
Open networking can only evolve with the support of a community of developers, says David Ward, CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect of Cisco.
Cisco is working on many open networking fronts, including OpenDaylight, OPNFV, ONOS and OpenStack. In this video, Ward also highlights NETCONf and YANG, two standards seen as keys for infrastructure programmability.
The end goal of open networking is to have a scalable infrastructure that is also lower cost to manage, says John Healy, General Manager of the SDN Division at Intel.
Open means more open in terms of standards and vendors. It also means being capable of working with the open source community.
OPNFV is an open source project under The Linux Foundation aimed at accelerating the introduction of NFV products and services. Prodip Sen, CTO of Network Functions Virtualization at HP and Chair of the OPNFV Project, provides a quick update of the community and its first release -- "Arno".
Arno provides an initial build of the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) and Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) components of ETSI NFV architecture. The baseline release enables continuous integration, automated deployment and testing of components from upstream projects such as Ceph, KVM, OpenDaylight, OpenStack and Open vSwitch.
The move toward open networks in unstoppable, says Houman Modarres, VP of Marketing at Nuage Networks.
The crux is this: with freedom of choice comes complexity. Nuage, a business unit of Alcatel-Lucent, is working to address this challenge by supporting a variety of deployment models.
This short video also hits on Cisco's role in OpenStack and how Comcast is moving ahead with its OpenStack designs.
Fujitsu Network Communications has successfully demonstrated interoperability between its Open Source SDN Controller and the ONOS controller developed by ON.Lab.
Tata is focusing on the building blocks for hybrid clouds, including direct connectivity via MPLS or Ethernet to the major public cloud providers. The carrier is also enhancing its global IP backbone to make it fit for business with better predictability and reduced latency. This video interview also highlights Tata's new partnership with Salesforce.
At the recent Open Networking Summit 2015 in Santa Clara, California, Corsa demonstrated its new bandwidth metering and QoS capabilities. Corsa also conducted a multi-vendor packet/optical optimization demonstration, along with a demonstration of the new "Atrium" software release from the ONF.
“Cloud is the killer app for security innovation,” said Pravin Kothari, founder and CEO of CipherCloud. “But currently, inefficiencies at the technical level in the form of custom connector protocols can hold back innovations in cloud security. Defining a uniform set of standards can enable us all to operate from the same playbook. As a pioneer in CASB, we are excited to co-lead this initiative with CSA to accelerate security across clouds.”
Open networking has great promise, says Verizon's Shawn Hakl, VP, Product and New Business Innovatio, but it must keep the end result in focus.
Capitalizing on the opportunities presented by Big Data entails the co-ordination of a number of cultural, organizational and technological facets. Synchronizing, harmonizing and harnessing these elements in support of business objectives require that IT departments are closely aligned with long-term business plans. Business operations for CSPs can benefit manifold with application of Data Analytics in their complex environment. From a customer experience and business operations perspective, proactive monitoring of hundreds of systems in real-time can prevent potential IT failures through timely alerts and minimal human effort or intervention. Real-time visibility into systems health helps CSPs deliver higher quality of service. 
(Vish) Vishwanath Ramachandran is Principal Consultant, Communications Vertical, Tech Mahindra
Vish has over 22 years of experience in IT services in the areas of Practice management, Program / Delivery management, Business consulting, Process redesign, Change management, Quality management and Software engineering.
ONOS features a highly available, scalable SDN control plane featuring northbound and southbound open APIs and paradigms for a diversity of management, control, and service applications across mission critical networks. It is architected as a distributed but logically centralized control plane to achieve high performance, scale-out and high availability. ONOS' high availability characteristics include full recovery from events such as switch and link failure, node failure, entire ONOS cluster failure, single node cluster failure, cluster partitioning and device-node communication failure.
Cisco is working on many open networking fronts, including OpenDaylight, OPNFV, ONOS and OpenStack. In this video, Ward also highlights NETCONf and YANG, two standards seen as keys for infrastructure programmability.
OPNFV is an open source project under The Linux Foundation aimed at accelerating the introduction of NFV products and services. Prodip Sen, CTO of Network Functions Virtualization at HP and Chair of the OPNFV Project, provides a quick update of the community and its first release -- "Arno".
The crux is this: with freedom of choice comes complexity. Nuage, a business unit of Alcatel-Lucent, is working to address this challenge by supporting a variety of deployment models.
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