BUILDING THE INFRASTRUCTURE TO ENABLE THE CHANGING FACE OF IT

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C I S C O S P A R K

What You Need to Know About the New Cisco Spark Board

N ET W O R K I N N O VAT I O N AWA R D

Barefoot Networks

E D I T O R’ S D E S K

When Your Network Goes Down Today, Costs Pile Up Fast

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Four Steps to Prepare for an SD-WAN Deployment

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k N ET W O R K A U T O M AT I O N

So Long Command Line? Automation Quietly Takes Over

T H E S U B N ET

NSX vs. ACI: An Engineer Who’s Used Both Weighs In

I N F O G R A P H I C S

Pulse Check

KEEPING THE LIGHTS ONAs the modern enterprise network experiences growing demands from end users and IT pros, the resulting strain

puts it at risk of major outages.

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edit name is sidebar color

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In a network

outage, everyone

loses—money,

time and face.

Don’t let it

happen to you.

EDITOR’S DESK | ALISSA IREI

When Your Network Goes Down Today, Costs Pile Up Fast

Hope for the best, and plan for the worst. It’s good advice for everyone from hikers and pilots to emergency responders and, yes, network managers.

After all, when the network goes down in today’s enterprise, tens of millions of dollars can go with it—not to mention the untold costs such an outage exacts on an organization’s brand and reputation. And while high-profile service incidents make na-tional news, less conspicuous outages still take their toll on an enterprise’s relationship with its end us-ers. No organization is safe from the lost confidence significant downtime engenders.

That’s the bad news. The good news is, after an incident of network failure, organizations of all stripes can learn from the outage. In this edition of Network Evolution, we share best practices for preventing incidents like the ones that took South-west Airlines’ network offline one day last year and

explore how cutting-edge technology can help keep you connected (“When It Comes to Today’s Net-work, You Break It … You’ll Pay”). Here’s how to ensure the next time a network goes down, it isn’t yours.

Also in this issue, we take a look at the evolving array of network automation tools, and how they could help make network managers’ jobs easier (“So Long Command Line? Automation Quietly Takes Over”).

And finally, grab your dry erase markers—we’ll break down Cisco’s new digital whiteboard (“What You Need to Know About the New Cisco Spark Board”). n

ALISSA IREIFeatures and E-zine Editor,

Networking Media Group

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BY STEVE ZURIER

Network Outages

When It Comes to Today’s Network, You Break It … You’ll Pay

CREDIT: COFOTOISME/ISTOCK

Ω Growing end-user demands put today’s enterpriseat increased risk of a major network outage … and with somuch business happening online, the stakes have neverbeen higher.

A network outage can cost an organization mil-lions of dollars and a dramatic loss in reputation. Just ask Southwest Airlines and Delta Airlines, carri-ers that suffered major outages last summer. South-west’s outage cost an estimated $54 million and the Delta power outage reportedly cost $150 million.

Industry experts say the airlines have been strug-gling to deliver more advanced technology services to their customers, putting them at risk for net-work issues. Travelers of all stripes are ordering flights online and want to receive tickets on their

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cellphones, putting a strain on booking and ticket-ing systems and corporate networks.

While what happened to the airlines has been fairly well-documented, the outage part is not a unique story. Most other industries are experienc-ing strains on their networks as well, and outages can and do happen in many other sectors—hitting major banks, telecommunication providers, cloud providers and universities. A one-day outage at Salesforce once cost the company $20 million.

BEST PRACTICESNetworking analysts say organizations can reduce

the pain from outages by fol-lowing some standard best practices.

“In the case of Southwest Airlines, where a router went down, that really shouldn’t have happened,” said Dan Conde, an analyst who cov-ers networking technologies for the Enterprise Strategy Group.

Conde said companies need to think in terms of three-to-five-year refresh schedules for core infra-structure and focus on built-in redundancy. They should also take advantage of modern network man-agement tools that offer visibility into the network.

Roberto Dovalina, associate director of digital infrastructure at St. Edward’s University, based in Austin, Texas, said that’s precisely what his team does. He and his colleagues support roughly 5,500 students and 1,200 faculty and staff.

Dovalina said, at St. Edward’s, they’ve deployed redundant core routers, firewalls and server chassis in the data center, equipment that they refresh ev-ery three to five years. They also replace the 12 rout-ers that support the campus buildings every five to seven years.

By having the redundant infrastructure, St. Ed-ward’s can periodically take down each piece of equipment for half a day to run tests.

They’ve also built intelligent logic and scripts into the system, so in the event the core routers go down, they can bring one or both of the routers back up and have all the applications ready to go with mini-mal downtime.

“Fixing the network after an outage is fairly

CREDIT: VECTORSTOCK

2,300flights were cancelled after a Southwest

Airlines network outage last year. SOURCE: “2,300 CANCELED FLIGHTS LATER, SOUTHWEST AIRLINES

RECOVERS FROM TECHNICAL OUTAGE,” DALLAS NEWS, JULY 2016.

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straightforward and may not take much time,” Dova-lina explained. “It’s bringing back the applications after an outage that is the most time-consuming. So by using the intelligent logic and scripts to bring back the application automatically, we can bring back the system fairly quickly. Users will barely no-tice an outage in the event some of the equipment goes down.”

‘DON’T BREAK ANYTHING’According to Dimension Data’s 2016 Network Ba-rometer report, 37% of network service incidents are due to human error, many of those related to

configuration mistakes. Organizations are taking

steps to correct the configu-ration issue. At St. Edward’s University, Dovalina said an engineer needs to approve any configuration change to the network.

Fidelity Information Ser-vices takes this concept one step further. Robert Lumsden,

enterprise network engineer, said every change ticket requires a full peer review. And prior to the change, the engineer, internal customers and any other pertinent stakeholders—such as staff from the accounting or sales department—hold a meeting so the engineer can fully explain the change and re-spond to any questions.

“What we try to do is evaluate the risk if some-thing goes wrong,” Lumsden said. “Our motto is ‘don’t break anything.’”

CLOSER PARTNERSHIPS, LIFELONG LEARNING Organizations also need to form better partnerships with their vendors, ultimately minimizing the risk of network outages, St. Edward’s Dovalina said. He added the university has worked closely with Ex-treme Networks to deploy its switches and routers.

“When selecting a vendor, you have to ask your-self, ‘Do they provide a full solution or just net-work equipment?’” Dovalina said. “When we start a project with Extreme Networks, we work together to strategize and define the solution, then set up a proof of concept that lets us test it as long as we need

Continued on page 7

“When selecting a vendor, you have to ask your self, ‘Do they provide a full solution or just

network equipment?’” —Roberto Dovalina, St. Edward’s.

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Best Practices to Prevent a Network Outage

Here are nine tips from ESG’s Dan Conde on how to prevent an outage at your organization.

1. Follow these best practices end-to-end. Your network is only as strong as its weakest link.

2. Do the basics. Maintain hardware, avoid old systems, run diagnostics, have proper power supply with backup and run power

system stress tests.

3. Run drills for the whole system. Run shutdowns on some links and see if the proper failovers occur. If they don’t, you might

have a configuration problem.

4. Use router standby protocols, if available. Be sure to have redundant links between router layers—and use protocols such

as Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol or Hot Standby Router Protocol so standby routers can take over if a primary one fails.

5. Partner with your ISP. Have alternate paths from the network carrier. Also, pay for enough bandwidth so that if standby paths

get saturated, they don’t cause a cascading failure.

6. Use updated network management tools. Have proper network visibility and monitoring tools that are used all the time, during

drills and during app deployment tests. This part is critical and key to service assurance—if you don’t see a problem, you don’t

know how to deal with it.

7. Think about the application layer. Design the whole architecture so that the infrastructure works with the apps. Architect the apps

first and then design the infrastructure to meet its needs. Look at both elements together.

8. Be thorough. Look for link failures and device failures. Don’t focus on one at the expense of the other.

9. Follow up. If you do have a failure, in real-life or in a drill, do a thorough post-mortem analysis.

DAN CONDE

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to before it’s deployed in production.” It’s also important to keep learning about the lat-

est networking trends. Dovalina said he and Paul Miklas, senior network administrator at St. Ed-

ward’s, make sure to attend local and national trade shows regularly.

“People wait for the tech-nology to come to them,” Miklas said. “We try to be proactive. For example, we’re spending a lot of time now learning about emerging tech-nologies and how they can fit into our operation.”

PROGRAMMABLE NETWORKSSome advocates of program-mable networking technology say it can minimize the risk of network outages by reducing the burdens of manual con-figuration and the associated

potential for errors.“For the past 20 years, managing networks has

been more or less the same,” said Jeff Reed, senior vice president of enterprise networks at Cisco. “Cus-tomers tell us that their network engineers spend 80% of their time just keeping the lights on. Many of the processes are manual-based tasks that keep top technology people from focusing on the applica-tions that make the business tick.”

Reed said Cisco has been focusing on more ef-ficient design in its switches, which also helps net-work engineers reduce configuration time. Vendors such as Brocade Communications Systems Inc., Pluribus Networks and Barefoot Networks also offer programmable networking technology.

“We’re trying to build more intelligence into the switches, so network engineers only have to deal with high-level policy,” Reed explained. “Network engineers should be focused more on which applica-tion traffic they need to prioritize as opposed to the nitty-gritty of network design.”

And sure, while better, more efficient switches and routers can help, networking organizations will still need to heed the best practices outlined by Dovalina and Lumsden. The new switches may last a

Continued from page 5

Down the drain: IT down-time costs North American businesses $700B per year

SOURCE: “THE COST OF SERVER, APPLICATION AND NETWORK DOWNTIME: ANNUAL NORTH AMERICAN ENTERPRISE SURVEY AND CALCULATOR,” IHS, JANUARY 2016, N=400.

5%Cost to fix

78%Productivity

loss

17%Revenue

loss

DRAIN: CIHANTERLAN/ISTOCK

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bit longer and reduce overhead, but networking or-ganizations will still need refresh policies. And even if the vast majority of configurations are automated, they will still need to be monitored in the event something irregular happens.

Finally, networking organizations will need to re-view the landscape and pick the networking partner that can best take them into the future. Some orga-nizations will stick with in-house data centers and

may remain loyal to familiar technologies and poli-cies. But economics may drive many enterprises to operate at least a part of their data center with cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Mi-crosoft Azure, a path that will require new ways of thinking and new technologies such as open source networking.

But that’s a topic for another day. For now, all you may want to do is keep the lights on. n

Data Mine

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k In the money: Public cloud services forecast, worldwide

60%of all connected devices worldwide are either smartphones or tablets, up from 17% in 2008.SOURCE: “MORE THAN 6 BILLION SMARTPHONES BY 2020, IHS MARKIT SAYS,” IHS, JANUARY 2017.

43+26+26+5+50 2017 2018 2019 2020

Business process services $44B $48B $52B $56B

Application infrastructure services $9B $11B $13B $15B

Application services $46B $55B $65B $76B

Management and security services $9B $10B $12B $14B

System infrastructure services $35B $46B $58B $72B

Advertising $105B $119B $134B $151B

Total market $247B $247B $333B $383B

SOURCE: “2016 SOFTWARE-DEFINED INFRASTRUCTURE (SDI) OUTLOOK,” 451 RESEARCH, MARCH 2016. NUMBERS HAVE BEEN ROUNDED. CREDIT: TWANG/VECTORSTOCK

k Software-defined infrastructure roadmapsWhat are your SDI adoption plans?

SOURCE: “GARTNER SAYS WORLDWIDE PUBLIC CLOUD SERVICES MARKET TO GROW 18% IN 2017,” GARTNER, FEBRUARY 2017. NUMBERS HAVE BEEN ROUNDED. CREDIT: INUENG/VECTORSTOCK

In use (not including

pilots)

In pilot/ proof of concept

Planning to implement by March

2018

No plans

21%18%

23%

39%

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Network Automation

So Long Command Line? Automation Quietly Takes Over

BY ALISSA IREI

Ω As network automation’s footprint grows, the command line interface could disappear.

When some longtime LinkedIn network engi-neers look back on the company’s first automated networking initiative, which was officially known as “zero-touch provisioning,” they jokingly refer to it as “zillion-touch provisioning.”

“It was basically a Frankenstein of different codes and scripts packaged together,” principal network architect Shawn Zandi said. “It was painful.”

But that early pain led to later automation gains for the social media site, based in Mountain View, Calif.—gains that Zandi said have allowed LinkedIn to dramatically scale its network infrastructure. The company now has a dedicated automation team and requires that every new network engineering hire demonstrate proficiency in automation scripts.

Network automation—often mentioned in the same breath as software-defined networking but

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arguably a distinct, if related, concept—uses code and scripts to trigger and carry out various network tasks in a standardized fashion. Advocates say it in-creases efficiency, minimizes inconsistencies and reduces the risk of human error. A variety of auto-mation tools have already edged out the traditional command line interface in some networks, such as LinkedIn’s.

Since those early days of zillion-touch provision-ing, Zandi said his team has continually improved its approach to automation by simplifying infra-structure, standardizing processes and minimizing unique “snowflake” elements in the network. Today,

virtually every networking task is completed using scripts.

“People don’t go to the individual router or switch and punch commands, because we want to make sure the configurations are intact and that there is integrity and data consistency,” Zandi said. “Other-wise, you could have switches with different setups and configurations.”

AUTOMATION FOR ALLAutomated networking isn’t limited to web-scale companies like LinkedIn. According to Enterprise

SOURCE: “NETWORK AUTOMATION: ENABLER OF IT PROCESS GOALS,” ENTERPRISE STRATEGY GROUP, JULY 2016, N=247. NUMBERS HAVE BEEN ROUNDED.

Playing favorites Which do you think is the most significant benefit of automation?

0 100%

Consistent configuration of devices

Network agility Automatic reconfiguration based on network feedback

Compliance Mitigation of human error

Reduced Capex

Reduced Opex

20% 10%14%15%17%18% 6%

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Strategy Group analyst Dan Conde, 44% of mid-market organizations—with 100 to 999 employees—said they use network automation. Among large enterprises of 1,000 employees, 56% said they do also.

Dave Chandler, practice director of enterprise network solutions for World Wide Technology (WWT), a third-party reseller, said he sees a rapidly growing interest in tools to automate basic network tasks, including those from Puppet, Chef, Ansible and more.

“Those tools don’t really require you to change a business process, so they can be implemented very quickly,” he said. “We see both small and large com-

panies adopting [them].” LinkedIn’s Zandi stressed that net-

work automation is achievable in any environment, with organizations of all sizes benefitting from consistent, efficient task management.

“Enterprises say, ‘We don’t have enough resources’; however, once you move to automation, you free up your resources to do more with the people you have,” Zandi said.

While conversations about network automa-tion often focus on the configuration of routers and switches, Conde said the big picture is more com-plex, and automated networking itself enjoys a more pervasive presence than many realize.

“Automation in different guises is sort of sneak-ing up on us,” Conde said. “It’s already here; you just may not realize it.”

While some vendors—such as Brocade and Hewlett Packard Enterprise—have clearly labeled network automation products, others have simply folded automation capabilities into their security, telemetry, analytics or software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) tools.

Cato Networks, for example, uses automated net-working elements to ensure plug-and-play provi-sioning for its SD-WAN customers. Leslie Cothren, IT director of Universal MH/DD/SAS—a distrib-uted healthcare provider based in Lenoir, N.C.—said he used to spend much of his time running between 11 branch sites to configure, maintain and trouble-shoot connections. Since adopting Cato’s technol-ogy, however, he can now spin up a new site in a matter of minutes.

“It is a very slick and simple process,” he said.

20%of respondents believe

DevOps and network automation are related.

SOURCE: “NETWORK AUTOMATION: ENABLER OF IT PROCESS GOALS,” ENTERPRISE STRATEGY GROUP,

JULY 2016, N=247.

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“Plug the device in, they set it up … and connectivity just happens between our branches.”

At LinkedIn, Zandi’s team also uses automation to collect performance data, delivering detailed in-sights into network conditions at any given time. Still other in-house automation tools scan for net-work anomalies, stress test network services and auto-remediate performance problems before they become critical. If light levels in an optic fiber have degraded beyond a pre-established point, for ex-ample, LinkedIn’s system automatically files a ticket with a data center engineer or technician requesting a repair.

DOUBLE-EDGED SWORDWhile automation helps reduce the likelihood of human error and can make network managers’ lives easier, it isn’t foolproof. Experts agree enterprises should proceed with caution.

“[If the automation] goes wrong, it’s going to be catastrophic,” Zandi said, adding that a major cloud vendor he declined to name recently brought down an entire data center with an automation error, af-fecting millions of users.

“It is certainly possible to use automation to au-tomate a disaster,” WWT’s Chandler agreed. Both he and Zandi said organizations should try to rigor-ously test their code. LinkedIn applies all scripts in a staging environment, for example, before moving them into production.

Chandler added that it’s important to build re-liable checks into scripts—so if something does go wrong, an intelligent feedback loop will recog-nize the error and automatically prompt a course correction.

“Automation has to be used wisely,” Zandi said. “It’s just yet another tool—you have to know how to use it.”

Those who don’t know how to use it might need to learn sooner rather than later. Based on feedback from WWT enterprise customers, Chandler said that he believes the command line interface’s days are numbered.

“If a network manager is not willing to learn those new tool sets and those new processes, … then I think he’s a little bit at risk,” he said. “If he moves into understanding [APIs and automation scripts], then I think he’s going to be successful. There is go-ing to be plenty of work for people to do that.”

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NETWORK, HEAL THYSELFLinkedIn’s automation efforts have come a long way since that early, zillion-touch, Frankenstein-like array of code and scripts. Zandi said he now views network infrastructure—including switches, power, cooling elements and optic fiber—as “just another set of data points” that can be controlled through code. While some would consider this a cutting-edge automated networking paradigm, LinkedIn has other ideas.

Zandi said the company ultimately envisions a

self-healing or “self-defined” network, capable of configuring and maintaining itself automatically without any human intervention. In service of that goal, his team constantly adds new automated ser-vices and features while removing legacy equipment and processes.

“Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away,” he said, quoting one of the Internet Engineering Task Force’s Twelve Networking Truths. “Make it as sim-ple as possible.” n

Pulse Check

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BUSINESS CONSUMER

k Keeping an eye on IoT: Projected internet of things connections worldwide

k Times have changed: Smartphones then and now

SOURCE: “UPDATED CISCO VNI COMPLETE FORECAST RELEASED TODAY (SO WHAT?),” CISCO BLOGS, JUNE 2016.

SOURCE: “GARTNER SAYS 8.4 BILLION CONNECTED “THINGS” WILL BE IN USE IN 2017, UP 31% FROM 2016,” GARTNER, FEBRUARY 2017. NUMBERS HAVE BEEN ROUNDED

$5B Predicted value of the hyper-converged infrastructure systems market by 2019. SOURCE: “PREPARE FOR THE NEXT PHASE OF HYPERCONVERGENCE,” GARTNER, INC., MAY 2016

38% of enterprise IT professionals say they have cloud-first

policies in place.SOURCE: “VOICE OF THE ENTERPRISE:

CLOUD TRANSFORMATION,” 451 RESEARCH, SEPTEMBER 2016.

2000 2015

Average storage 4 MB 32 GB

Average speed 200 Kbps 8 Mbps

Average data consumed monthly

0.05 MB 1.2 GB

0 2B 4B 6B 8B 10B 12B

2016 2.4B 4.0B

Total: 6.4B

2017 3.1B 5.2B

Total: 8.3B

2018 4.2B 7.0B

Total: 11.2B

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Ω Cisco is bringing the virtualworld of its team collaborationapp into the physical meetingroom with the new Spark Boardinteractive display screen.

Corporate teams now work together online and in meeting rooms. In an effort to reflect that new reality, Cisco has married virtual and physical col-laboration with a revamped Spark and a tightly inte-grated electronic whiteboard.

The Spark Board, which Cisco unveiled in late January, takes Spark’s version of team collaboration into the meeting room, where the cloud-based ap-plication becomes an in-room group experience on the interactive display screen.

“It’s a bit surprising Cisco has created such a sig-nificant endpoint just for Spark,” said Dave Michels, an independent analyst focused on unified commu-nications (UC) and collaboration products. “It really

Cisco Spark

What You Need to Know About the New Cisco Spark Board

BY ANTONE GONSALVES

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shows a commitment to the new [Spark] service.”Cisco is marketing Spark Board as a three-in-one

interactive touchscreen. The wall-mounted device can be used as a whiteboard, a videoconferencing system or presentation screen for a laptop or mobile device. The device includes a 4K high-definition dis-play, microphones and video camera.

“Spark Board is like a tablet on the wall,” Jens Meg-gers, general manager of Cisco’s cloud collaboration technology group, said in a briefing before the prod-uct’s launch.

SPARK REVAMP FOR INTERACTIVE DISPLAYCisco has redesigned Spark to make Spark Board an

extension of the software. “The entire UX [user experience] has been completely overhauled,” said Richard Townhill, senior director of product management at the company. “It’s a very dif-ferent application.”

Whatever is drawn or dis-played on the board is also shown in Spark. People joining

a meeting from a remote location can use the app to draw on Spark Board, or show content from a lap-top, smartphone or tablet. All of the content that is shared at a meeting, including board sketches, is saved in Spark.

“The missing piece in establishing effective meet-ings for virtual teams has been the inability for dis-tributed participants to collaborate effectively in ideation and annotation,” said Irwin Lazar, an ana-lyst at Nemertes Research, based in Mokena, Ill.

The integration between the interactive display screen and Spark software makes the board easy to use, according to Cisco. Analysts have criticized interactive displays, in general, as being difficult to operate.

Analysts have also said the devices are expen-sive. Cisco hopes to address that problem by selling a 55-inch version of Board for $4,990, plus a $200 monthly subscription to Cisco’s cloud, which han-dles the interactions between Spark and the interac-tive display. A standard internet connection handles communications between the technologies.

The vendor expects to offer a 70-inch version of the hardware later in the year for $9,990, plus the $200 monthly subscription.

23%of enterprises say they use interactive

whiteboards or related technology. SOURCE: “2016-17 ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY BENCHMARK:

UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AND COLLABORATION,” NEMERTES RESEARCH, SEPTEMBER 2016, N=40.

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MARKET FOR INTERACTIVE DISPLAYS HEATS UPEnterprises are paying attention to the develop-ment of interactive displays for meeting rooms. Al-most a quarter of companies surveyed by Nemertes are using the platforms, while another 47% are evaluating them.

The primary users are small teams that have to share and manipulate visual content, Lazar said. Those teams are typically in research and develop-ment, engineering, product design and marketing.

Companies in the Nemertes survey are budgeting about $10,000 per year, per room for interactive dis-play screens, so Cisco’s prices are competitive in the

market, Lazar said.The Spark overhaul, done in

support of Spark Board, included incorporating the capabilities of Cisco’s WebEx videoconferenc-ing software, which Cisco plans to continue supporting as a stand-alone product. Also, Cisco has introduced a new dashboard in Spark for managing activities, such as meetings, messaging,

video and audio calling, sharing files and using Board.

Cisco has also introduced APIs that partners and resellers can use to add applications on top of the collaboration software.

SPARK BOARD VERSUS SURFACE HUBCisco’s largest competitor in collaboration software and interactive displays is Microsoft. Analysts ex-pect Board to go head-to-head with Surface Hub, which Microsoft launched last year.

Companies using the initial version of Surface Hub have complained of a lack of software to make the collaboration platform more useful to teams. Also, Hub lacked the ability to make external calls.

Despite the shortcomings, the hardware carries a hefty price. Microsoft is selling the 55-inch model for $9,000 and an 84-inch version for $22,000.

Given the Surface Hub’s price and capabilities, it appears the features Cisco has incorporated in Spark Board raise the bar, said Philip Edholm, presi-dent of UC advisory firm PKE Consulting LLC, based in Pleasanton, Calif. n

47%of enterprises say they are currently

evaluating interactive whiteboards or related technology.

SOURCE: “2016-17 ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY BENCHMARK: UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AND COLLABORATION,”

NEMERTES RESEARCH, SEPTEMBER 2016, N=40.

Network Innovation Award

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Barefoot Networks: Tofino

To learn more about why Barefoot Networks is our latest Network Innovation Award winner, read the whole story on SearchNetworking.

Princeton and Stanford. Tofino will soon be available in white box switches from Edgecore Networks and WNC.

k W H Y W E L I K E I T

The Tofino chip gives managers unprecedented control over how their network devices process packets, which can help them pin- point performance problems and improve efficiency. With Bare-foot’s Tofino silicon, users can also program their switches to perform middlebox functions, such as load-balancing, intrusion detection and traffic deduplication.

k W H AT I T I S

A high-speed, programmable Ethernet switch chip

k W H AT I T D O E S

The Tofino chip allows users to tailor the way their network de-vices treat packets, creating a programmable forwarding plane—while still processing packets at 6.5 Tbps.

k H OW I T WO R K S

Users write programs for Tofino silicon using the open source language P4, which Barefoot created with Google, Intel, Microsoft,

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Here’s how

enterprises can

think strategi-

cally about

their software-

defined WAN

investments.

OVER THE WIRE | SD-WAN | ANDREW FROEHLICH

Four Steps to Prepare for an SD-WAN Deployment

Software-defined WAN technologies are being proudly marketed as an end-all, be-all solution to eliminate costly MPLS and Metro Ethernet connec-tions in favor of low-cost broadband. In many cases, this claim is true. Some circumstances, however, dictate the need to maintain some or all leased-line connectivity. Let’s look at several of the connectiv-ity decision points you should consider as you begin your preparation for an SD-WAN deployment.

It’s important to understand SD-WAN tech-nologies are already quite capable. Compared with standard WAN acceleration techniques that simply cache, compress and otherwise optimize a link to lower overall bandwidth, SD-WAN also helps lower overall latency. When two or more WAN links are available, SD-WAN tools monitor each link to deter-mine the fastest path at any given moment. Data is forwarded down the best path on a packet-by-packet

basis. Ultimately, this helps reduce overall delay and jitter—even when using standard internet broad-band connections. All of these reasons explain why high growth is expected in this technology segment.

Yet, while SD-WAN works, it may not be able to fully handle everything you throw at it. If your WAN currently consists of leased lines—whether they are MPLS, Metro Ethernet or legacy digital lines—the service provider can provide end-to-end throughput and latency guarantees. These are included in your service-level agreement when you sign the contract. And while SD-WAN over multiple broadband con-nections certainly helps with throughput and la-tency issues, there is still no performance guarantee for the customer. If you are running SD-WAN across two separate broadband connections, for example, yet both are experiencing internet congestion or high latency to the destination, your end users are

CREDIT: SORBETTO/ISTOCK

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going to notice. This is especially true with latency-sensitive data flows, such as real-time voice and video communications.

PREPARING FOR SD-WAN DEPLOYMENTHere are four actions you should take to help your organization decide if SD-WAN is a good idea, and where to start.

1. Prioritize remote sites. A first step in any SD-WAN migration plan is to prioritize your remote sites by how critical they are. If a site is considered critical to the organization, it may make sense to maintain your leased-line infrastructure to better ensure op-erational effectiveness around the clock. You can, however, consider a substitute connection by imple-menting SD-WAN and adding a broadband link as a secondary connection. This will give you intelligent routing capabilities over a less-expensive transport medium. In other words, you can replace a more ex-pensive secondary leased line with a cheaper broad-band connection.

So, if a company previously had two MPLS links connecting a single WAN site for redundancy pur-poses at critical locations, you could eliminate one MPLS link, replace it with a cheaper broadband internet link, and implement intelligent SD-WAN routing to route across one MPLS and one broad-band link. You may even be able to lower the overall

SD-WAN Gaining SteamSD-WAN deployments are projected to skyrocket in the next few years, with 30% of enterprises using the technology by 2019, compared to only a handful today, according to Gartner.

SOURCE: TECHTARGET (DATA FROM GARTNER)

30%

25%

20%

15%

10%

5%

0

2016 2017 2018 2019

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leased-line throughput to a critical site to save money, while still providing the necessary level of service demanded.

2. Research broadband options. If a remote site is on the lower end of your criticality list, by all means, consider replacing those leased lines with SD-WAN and two or more low-cost broadband links. Just keep in mind that broadband options are going to vary widely from remote site to remote site. You may even run into situations where multiple carri-ers do not exist. That’s why a thorough investigation of broadband and leased-line options is necessary before making any final decisions on an SD-WAN deployment.

3. Migrate sites incrementally. You should also migrate remote sites to SD-WAN on a rolling ba-sis. Start with just a few low-priority locations to test SD-WAN capabilities and to work out any

configuration kinks along the way. Many SD-WAN technologies are being advertised as plug-and-play. But in every situation, SD-WAN deployment will require configuration adjustments to better opti-mize the WAN for your specific application and data transport needs.

4. Crunch the numbers. Finally, once you’ve inves-tigated which remote sites can eliminate or down-grade expensive leased-line connectivity—and once you figure out broadband options—it’s time to crunch the numbers. Because SD-WAN technolo-gies are relatively new, vendors are asking a pre-mium price. As a result, the cost reduction of overall leased-line replacement with broadband must cover the cost of purchasing SD-WAN hardware, software and services over a relatively short time frame. You should aim for a break-even point of three years or less. If you can’t reach that goal, you may want to wait until the cost of SD-WAN deployment drops. n

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THE SUBNET | Q&A | ALISSA IREI

NSX vs. ACI: An Engineer Who’s Used Both Weighs In

Almost since the inception of the software-defined networking market, many observers have speculated whether VMware NSX or Cisco Applica-tion Centric Infrastructure would emerge as the industry leader. Some enterprises, such as Sugar Creek Packing Co., based in Washington Court House, Ohio, have opted to deploy NSX and ACI in concert, thus maintaining flexibility and reaping benefits of both products.

We recently caught up with Sugar Creek senior network engineer Wes Dawes to talk all things net-working—from the development of his own career to the evolution of the industry. He also shared which SDN option he’d recommend to other enter-prise network managers—NSX or ACI—after de-ploying both.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How did you get into networking?Originally, I was more of a systems administrator, working with servers and storage. I worked in the financial industry and I was looking to move, as the bank I worked for was looking to be sold. This job just happened to become available here at Sugar Creek, about eight years ago. Originally my position was 50% networking and 50% servers and storage, and it kind of developed into 100% networking.

What was the transition to networking like?It was quite a transition. I had very little experience with networking equipment. The most I’d really ever touched it was if I went out and did field work for the bank, maybe I’d help the network guy on site. I’d help rack up the equipment or I might patch in some cables, but other than that I had very limited experience.

n Wes Dawes

n Senior Network Engineer

n Sugar Creek Packing Co.

n Washington Court House, Ohio

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How did you learn?I primarily learned on the job. Just a lot of reading at night, and picking up some spare equipment and working on it and trying to figure things out without breaking anything in our production environment. After I got my feet wet a little bit, I did some train-ing, got a few certifications and started really enjoy-ing networking, and continued my education.

What about networking appeals to you? It’s just kind of an exciting part of the industry to be in. When I first started, it was new to me, so that was part of the appeal. But then, over the last few years, with everything developing and becoming more software-defined and being able to do things pro-grammatically across the network, it’s making it even more exciting. There have been all kinds of changes over the last few years and lots more to come.

How is Sugar Creek approaching the changes afoot in the networking industry?One of our latest adventures was probably within the last two years: We did a connected factory in Cambridge City, Ind., jointly with Cisco. So basi-cally, everything in the plant—wireless, routing and

switching, telepresence, phone system, everything down to the factory floor—is wired to the hilt. It’s amazing how well everything works together and the data we are able to collect.

Within this last year—as soon as we finished that project—we jumped right into a software-defined data center project that we did with VMware and their NSX product. We also have some Cisco ACI in there.

Why deploy both NSX and ACI?When we started exploring those two technolo-gies, it was still very unclear who was winning that race and which one was going to be the technology to end up with—who was going to be the leader and give us everything that we needed. So we more or less hedged our bets on that decision and said, ‘let’s just put both in, and if the tides change, we can more easily maneuver around. Or maybe they are both go-ing to be great technologies, with one complement-ing the other.’

If you were to choose one, which would it be?There have been a lot of developments since the time that we made the decision, and I’d say

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VMware is definitely the route that businesses need to look to nowadays. Now, don’t get me wrong, be-cause each technology has its pros and its cons, and it all depends on the existing environment it’s going into. We were in an environment that was 99% vir-tualized to begin with, so NSX is the right choice for us—along with all the other VMware technologies we decided to go with in here, like [vSAN].

NSX’s programmability makes it much easier to make changes on the fly, without having to worry about going into the data center and running new wires or moving things around. Another big thing for us is the security features with microsegmenta-tion. Before, we would always secure the edges of our data centers, and now, NSX allows us to bring that security down to the virtual machine level. We can get a little bit more granular with security and really take care of things.

I’d say by the end of this year, we’ll probably have our security set up to a point where we feel comfort-able with it. And then it will be normal operations after that.

How do you use ACI? It’s deployed, and we don’t really do a whole lot with

it. It’s really there for monitoring at this point. It al-lows us to have a single pane of glass from the Cisco side, so we can just go in and, at a glance say, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve got some network problems going on around the ACI infrastructure.’ It allows us to pin-point issues quickly, rather than having to do more manual troubleshooting. We don’t use any of the real nitty-gritty ACI features.

Does your previous experience working with servers and storage help you in your current networking position? It does, and that was true from the beginning, when I first started on the network side. Understanding the servers and the storage and how everything is configured on that end, and being able to tie that into the network, that’s allowed us to keep our team small and make quick decisions. It’s definitely help-ing as I go forward, now that I understand the serv-ers the storage and I understand the network piece of it. One complements the other.

How much does the networking team interact with the server team? There are a few of us on the network side, and there

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are a couple of guys on the server side. We all sit in the same room, in the same cubicle area, and we are constantly working together. We have that division of, ‘Hey, we’re really good at the networking side—but we’re good at the server stuff too, and we can do that if we have to.’ And the server guys are kind of the same way. They focus more on the servers, but they understand enough about networking, because they work with us so much. It really helps make us feel more like one team than two.

What advice would you give to young IT professionals just beginning their careers?I’d tell them to explore all of it and figure out what they enjoy, because that’s the most important thing:

coming to work to a job that you enjoy. And if I was trying to sway them toward the networking side of things, I’d probably end up telling them, ‘Hey, the networking side is really exciting right now. There are lots of changes coming, lots of opportunities for growth, new areas that other people don’t have ex-perience in—so the sooner you get that experience, you’ll be better off.’

Would you recommend they seek out opportunities to learn about programmable networking tools?Absolutely, that technology is here to stay. It’s still early; it’s going to evolve and change a little bit, and that will be for the better I’m sure. But I don’t see that going away. n

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CONTRIBUTORS

ANDREW FROEHLICH is president of West Gate Networks and has been involved in enterprise IT for over 15 years, largely focused Cisco wired and wireless voice network de-sign, implementation and support as well as network se-curity. Froehlich also been heavily involved in data center architectures designed to provide fault-tolerant enterprise applications and services to thousands of users.

ANTONE GONSALVES is news director for the Network-ing Media Group. He has deep and wide experience in tech journalism. Since the mid-1990s, he has worked for UBM’s InformationWeek, TechWeb and Computer Reseller News. He has also written for Ziff Davis’s PC Week, IDG’s CSOonline and IBTMedia’s CruxialCIO, and rounded all of that out by covering startups for Bloomberg News.

ALISSA IREI is features and e-zine editor of Network Evo-lution in TechTarget’s Networking Media Group. Irei was previously the site editor for SearchSDN. Prior to joining TechTarget, she worked as a news anchor, producer and re-porter at NBC affiliates in Montana, and as a lead editor at a Boston-based content marketing firm.

STEVE ZURIER is a freelance technology journalist based in Columbia, Md., with more than 30 years of journalism and publishing experience. Zurier worked as features editor at Government Computer News and InternetWeek.

Network Evolution is a SearchNetworking.com e-publication.

Kate Gerwig, Editorial Director

Alissa Irei, Features and E-zine Editor

Kara Gattine, Executive Managing Editor

Chuck Moozakis, Executive Editor

Antone Gonsalves, Director of News

Linda Koury, Director of Online Design

Anita Koury, Graphic Designer

Nick Arena, Associate Managing Editor, E-Products

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