Their "Special Sauce?" Cloud Service Providers and Their Software-Defined Networks

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER Their "Special Sauce?" Cloud Service Providers and Their Software-Defined Networks Sponsored by: Brocade Brad Casemore June 2014 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Computing and datacenter architectures are being recast by advances in virtualization, cloud, mobility, big data (analytics), and social computing. Enterprises are looking at what workloads they wish to run internally on private clouds and at how they can derive meaningful benefits from hybrid cloud models. Meanwhile, cloud service providers (CSPs) are preparing to meet the groundswell of enterprise demand. They have virtualized their datacenter compute infrastructure, and now they are looking to software including software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualized network functions (for network and security services) to provide the automation, agility, and elasticity that will help them meet their operational requirements and provide substantive business value in the form of opex and capex savings. In this white paper, IDC examines how SDN and other software-based network infrastructures can provide an integral fulcrum on which CSPs can align their network infrastructure with the requirements and business objectives of their customers. SITUATION OVERVIEW Why CSPs Need Software-Defined Network Solutions Many CSPs have heavily virtualized datacenters. Their servers are virtualized, and they run virtualized applications and services for their many clients. Virtualization is the new default in the datacenter, with more virtual servers than physical servers now in operation. Consequently, these datacenter environments must provide support for scalable multitenancy and isolation, not only for the sake of their customers but also for the efficiency and viability of the CSP's business. It is important to note that IT is the business for CSPs, whereas for even very large enterprises across a number of vertical markets, IT is a business support, albeit often a critical one. IT provides and represents the core business value that CSPs deliver to their customers. That means all investments in IT all the way from the automated front-end interfaces that clients use to order their services to the June 2014, IDC #249252

2 back-end infrastructure that provides the foundation for the services are essential to the success of the business and often serve as key competitive differentiators. Indeed, enterprise customers of CSPs understand that public cloud confers distinct advantages: Value is accrued from moving to an opex model and from gaining business agility. In IDC's 2013 CloudTrack Survey, enterprise respondents cited a number of prominent drivers for moving to the public cloud: access to the newest functionality faster, increased revenue from enabling new revenue-generating products and services faster, improved resource utilization, reduced size of the overall IT budget, giving business units more control over the sourcing of IT solutions, and improving overall IT productivity (see Figure 1). FIGURE 1 Reasons for Moving to the Public Cloud Get access to the newest functionality faster Increase revenue by enabling us to build new revenue-generating products and services faster Improve resource utilization Reduce the total size of IT budget 40 Give business units more direct control over sourcing their own IT solutions Improve IT staff productivity and/or reduce IT staff head count (% of respondents) n = 1,109 Note: Data represents business and IT decision makers currently using cloud or planning to use cloud within the next 12 months. Source: IDC's CloudTrack Survey, IDC #

3 As a result, CSPs whether they provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS) perceive their datacenter infrastructure, which serves as their business engine, as a linchpin of success. For CSPs, it is imperative to deliver services with immediacy and at optimal velocity. To do so, they need an infrastructure that is agile, automated, orchestrated, and perfectly aligned with the workloads it supports. Multitenancy and isolation are essential to customers, and resource utilization and IT efficiency are critical to the viability of the service provider's business. If customers are not served quickly and satisfactorily, they will go elsewhere and if the infrastructure does not perform at peak efficiency, the business will not prosper. In this context, automation becomes a necessity. This is true throughout the datacenter, but it is particularly pertinent to network infrastructure. For CSPs, the network cannot be managed on a perbox, per-unit basis, constrained by manual resources and the vagaries of the CLI. Provisioning of applications and services and the networks that support them must be fast, and automation is the means by which such service velocity is attained. CSPs need automated provisioning, programmatic management, and seamless integration with orchestration systems. For their businesses to succeed, they need a software-defined infrastructure that can provide the foundation for those capabilities. Problems SDN Addresses, Architecturally and Operationally Limits of Traditional Network Architectures and Infrastructure Traditional datacenter network architectures were designed in a previous era for application workloads and traffic patterns far different from those now accommodated by CSPs. Traditional networks were designed primarily to support n-tier client/server applications with north-south traffic patterns from fixed endpoints (clients) all the way through to dedicated Web, application, and database servers. As such, multitier networks manually mirrored the application architectures they supported. Then came virtualization, which paved the way for cloud computing and cloud services. With virtualization and cloud came support for new types of traffic as well as for mobility. East-west traffic patterns, from server to server, became more prevalent, displacing traditional north-south traffic. What's more, the great speed with which virtual machines (VMs) could be spun up was at odds with the slower speed with which networks could be provisioned manually to support them. As such, the network became a bottleneck and an inhibitor, not only to operational efficiency but also to the success of the CSP as a business entity IDC #

4 Inflexible, piecemeal, manual network provisioning via the CLI could not keep pace with the needs of cloud clients or those that served them. What's more, traditional networks and their processes were not well integrated with other aspects of datacenter infrastructure. The network infrastructure became conspicuous through its inability to accommodate the virtualized workloads and the agile business imperatives of the cloud. Indeed, as an IDC survey found, enterprises, as well as CSPs, have become painfully aware that the network is not well suited to make changes in support of application workloads (see Figure 2). FIGURE 2 The Network Is Not Well Suited to Making Changes Q. What does your network not do well today? Manual or slow changes (network changes are slow and/or hard to complete) Resilience (changes cause service disruptions) Performance (network is often a bottleneck constraining application performance) Scalability (it's hard to easily add physical storage or compute to the datacenter) Application change freedom (application changes require network changes) Reliability (network underperforms availability demands) Security complexity (security adds too much complexity) Security (security or similar risk issues are unsatisfactory) Management (it's hard to manage changes to the network) Other (% of respondents) n = 510 Source: IDC's Why the Network Matters Survey, 2013 In light of the changing nature of workloads and how those workloads are exposing the limitations of traditional networking, many CSPs and cloud-oriented enterprises have looked to software-defined networking as a solution. SDN first gained favor with Web-scale and hyperscale datacenters and with CSPs. IDC has forecast that the worldwide market for SDN will reach $3.7 billion in 2016, encompassing (from the bottom of the stack up) network infrastructure, controller and virtualization software, network (and security) services and applications, and professional services IDC #

5 In a recent survey, IDC asked respondents to cite the primary motivation for considering or implementing SDN. Preliminary results indicate that about 28% cited a need for the network to have greater agility to support virtualized applications and the transition to cloud. Nearly the same percentage, just less than 28%, called out a need to better deliver new applications or services across the network. Meanwhile, 20% cited a requirement for improved programmability of the network for operational efficiency and opex gains, whereas 12% identified a need to increase the speed of infrastructure provisioning to support application workloads. About 6% referred to a need to scale the network to support various and growing (existing) workloads (see Figure 3). FIGURE 3 What's Driving Today's SDN Deployments Q. Which of the following factors is the primary motivation for considering or implementing SDN? Need the network to have more agility to support virtualized applications/ cloud Increase ability to deliver new applications or services across the network facilitated by SDN Require better programmability of network for operational efficiency (opex gains) Increase speed for provisioning the infrastructure for application workloads 12 Scale the network to support various and growing workloads 6 Use SDN to lower capex (initial investment costs) 3 Simplify moves, adds, changes, and decommissions (% of respondents) n = 500 Source: IDC's SDN Survey, IDC #

6 On the opex front, survey results suggest that many early adopters of SDN have derived significant business value. Nearly 46% said they have derived opex cost savings of 10 20%, while another 31% claimed to have managed opex savings of 20 30%. Early adopters of SDN reported substantial capex gains too. Nearly 44% said that they have experienced capex savings of 10 20%, while about 27% reported capex cost savings of 20 30% (see Figure 4). FIGURE 4 Early Adopters Claim Opex and Capex Gains from SDN Q. What operational (opex/capex) cost savings has your organization derived from implementing SDN? Under 10% 10 20% % More than 30% Don't know (% of respondents) Opex Capex n = 294 Source: IDC's SDN Survey, 2014 Support for Virtualized Workloads There's no question that virtualization growth will continue to expand in the datacenter as the cloud becomes increasingly pervasive (see Figure 5). The pace of virtualization has been further expedited by the increased processing power of multicore, industry-standard x86 servers. IDC forecasts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.7% for virtual machines for During the same time frame, the number of host machines will grow 7.6% and the number of physical machines (standalone servers) will increase 4.2% IDC #

7 (Number of deployments) Meanwhile, smart connected devices will also proliferate in number and variety. IDC forecast that in 2020, more than 30 billion connected devices will be in circulation worldwide. These devices will be connected to cloud-based applications. The interplay between mobile devices and the cloud will generate an enormous amount of data, providing further impetus for adoption of agile, software-driven datacenter infrastructure. FIGURE 5 Exploding Application Portfolios, ,000,000 45,000,000 40,000,000 35,000,000 30,000,000 25,000,000 20,000,000 15,000,000 10,000,000 5,000, Nonvirtualized physical servers Virtualized physical servers Virtualized logical servers Source: Worldwide Virtual Machine Forecast: Virtualization Buildout Continues Strong (IDC #242762, August 2013) Support for Isolation and Multitenancy Virtualization, especially in the context of cloud services, entails the need for multitenancy and isolation. Each client needs direct, simple access to resources and services that can be provisioned automatically and provide the requisite elasticity and scale. Since these services are being obtained from a virtualized datacenter, it is essential that multitenancy and isolation be supported, both for the sake of customers and for the efficiency and scalability of the CSP's business model IDC #

8 Need for Faster, Automated Provisioning, Configuration, and Ongoing Management Similarly, the datacenter network underlying these services must operate at the agility and speed of cloud computing. That means the time it takes to provision the network must be aligned with the time it takes to spin up VMs for cloud clients. For hard business reasons, CSP datacenter infrastructure, including the network, must be automated from initial provisioning through to operational management and overall orchestration. In this context, manual processes are not only cumbersome and slow but also operationally untenable. CSPs are on a never-ending quest for greater operational and business agility (see Figure 6). FIGURE 6 Agility The Never-Ending Journey Source: IDC, 2014 Programmability Northbound and Southbound The datacenter network for CSPs, besides supporting automated provisioning, programmatic management, or cloud orchestration, must also support open standards for northbound and southbound APIs. Whereas the latter includes protocols, such as OpenFlow, which allows a decoupled controller to program flows to datacenter switches, the former is imperative to give orchestration systems and the applications they support programmatic control over the underlying datacenter infrastructure IDC #

9 For the CSP, which is looking to provide support for enterprise customers that have their own private clouds, it is critical to support open standards that ensure compatibility, interoperability, and workload migration. As a result, CSPs look to network infrastructure vendors that have a strong track record of supporting open standards and industry-standard protocols throughout the cloud solution stack, including open northbound and southbound APIs. Support for Orchestration Platforms The SDN solution stack for CSPs extends from network devices (physical and virtual switches and routers) up to controller software for SDN and network virtualization and on to network and security services and finally to orchestration and the applications and services it enables. Open source orchestration platforms, such as OpenStack, have become prevalent in the industry, prized for their openness, interoperability, community involvement, innovation, and capacity to provide hybrid cloud solutions. CLOUD BENEFITS THAT CAN BE DERIVED FROM SDN A number of benefits accrue from deploying an SDN infrastructure to support the technological, operational, and business requirements of CSPs. These benefits include reduced operational expenditures, greater operational agility, improved resource utilization, faster time to service/value, and new service creation. The following enumerates each of these benefits: Lower operational expenditures. By automating provisioning and management, CSPs can save on operational costs associated with networking. They can wire once and then manage programmatically and virtually, using orchestration to provision infrastructure resources consistently and quickly. Greater operational agility (provisioning and so forth). Customers can not only save money on automated, rather than manual, provisioning and management but also gain significant operational agility, doing things faster and more consistent with IT as a service. Improved resource utilization. Service providers are able to use manpower more efficiently and compute, storage, and networking resources more optimally. Expedited service delivery/time to value. In line with IT as a service, SDN enables CSPs to speed the delivery of new services, from inception to deployment. New service creation. SDN allows CSPs to develop new network services and to introduce full-stack network as a service. Potential network-as-a-service (NaaS) offerings include load balancing (LBaaS), WAN optimization, IPAM, and VPN, to name just a few IDC #

10 HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS (TO ADDRESS PROBLEMS AND REALIZE BENEFITS) Network Infrastructure It is important to have a network fabric and related network services that are wholly consistent with an SDN architectural model. As noted previously, SDN arose as a response to the operational and business needs of Web-scale entities and CSPs that had come to recognize the inherent limitations of traditional datacenter networks and their manual operational regimens. It is essential for the network infrastructure to provide not only stellar performance, scale, and reliability but also the attributes of agility, programmability, and flexibility. By laying a strong physical foundation in the form of a robust datacenter fabric, cloud operators will have a critical fulcrum on which higher-layer services can depend. Datacenter Fabric Salient Requirements CSPs should look for switches that embrace open, industry-standard protocols. Proprietary protocols and extensions can inhibit service provider competitiveness and innovation by locking customers into closed environments that evolve only at the pace of a given vendor's product release cycle. It's also important to consider a switch fabric that provides any-to-any connectivity and that scales with your compute infrastructure, thereby offering an elastic foundation for cloud services. Given the continuing and growing prevalence of virtualization in cloud datacenters, it makes good sense for service providers to prioritize network infrastructure that supports network and datacenter virtualization, both through its own features and functionality and through support for third-party virtualization products and solutions, including support for industry-standard encapsulation protocols such as VXLAN and NVGRE. Similarly, CSPs should seek out infrastructure that supports open, industry-standard SDN controller platforms, such as OpenDaylight, as well as integration with higher-layer cloud orchestration systems such as OpenStack. Adherence to open, industry-standard protocols will also ensure that customers obtain underlying datacenter infrastructure that is programmable and open, with support for industrystandard northbound and southbound APIs. SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS Orchestration, Management, Automation Tools, Overlays, Software Gateways, etc. With a strong physical foundation in place, a cloud datacenter network that supports a virtualized, isolated multitenant environment will require a complete stack of higher-layer SDN software. This could include controllers, management software, automation tools, and overlay-based network virtualization, with attendant support for encapsulation protocols such as VXLAN. Software gateways are also critical components, ensuring federation and visibility of physical and virtual workloads IDC #

11 GUIDELINES FOR CSPs ADOPTING SDN CSPs considering SDN should carefully evaluate their requirements based on a number of market-based criteria: Application workloads. How will your customers' workloads change, in volume and type, during the next few years? What applications will enterprise customers want to run as VMs in the cloud, and what applications will remain as physical workloads, hosted in their own datacenters or in a third-party facility? Are your enterprise customers planning to move toward a fully virtualized environment or to maintain a significant proportion of physical workloads? Your network exists to serve customer applications that run on it, not as an island unto itself. Your network infrastructure is a critical foundation for your enterprise customers' workloads. As a result, it's critical to the success of your business. Cloud adoption. When and how will your enterprise customers adopt cloud computing? What are their plans for private cloud and public cloud? Which applications or initiatives are they most likely to run in the cloud to take advantage of capabilities such as "cloud bursting?" If they are adopting (or have adopted) private cloud, what cloud orchestration system will be implemented, and how compatible and interoperable will it be with your infrastructure? It's important to understand how enterprise customers are making their cloud journey so that you can meet their needs up and down the cloud stack, from application requirements to cloud management systems (such as OpenStack) and then down to the SDN controller platforms and underlying network infrastructure. Again, remember that the network exists to support and must be aligned with the business value associated with your customers' workloads. Breaking down silos and working more collaboratively. Because a move to software-driven models puts the focus squarely on IT-wide support for business-critical application workloads, operational models must be changed accordingly. Preliminary results from a recent IDC survey indicate that organizations that have adopted cloud computing and SDN plan to restructure their IT departments to break down silos and move toward more of a DevOps model. Nearly 47% of respondents indicated that they plan to restructure as a result of SDN adoption, and another 28% said that they already have restructured their IT operations. IDC believes that the CSPs that will benefit most from SDN will be those that foster a more collaborative, integrated approach to IT operations. Just as the network is becoming more closely aligned with other aspects of datacenter infrastructure, so are the teams that manage and maintain the infrastructure. Automation. It should be obvious, but automation will be critical for CSPs to serve the needs of a broad base of enterprise customers. This automation extends from front-end self-service portals that simplify the process of customer engagement through to back-end IT-as-a-service mechanisms for provisioning, management, and visibility. Many service providers will seek to standardize the automation tools they use across their entire range of datacenter infrastructure IDC #

12 CONCLUSION As the cloud emerges as a key platform for the next era of IT, software-defined infrastructure becomes a critical enabler of business success for CSPs and their enterprise customers. The latter look to the public cloud: For fast access to new features and functionality To enable new revenue-generating services To reduce their overall IT budgets To provide business units (and business managers) with greater control over their choice of IT solutions Meanwhile, CSPs must find a way to facilitate those outcomes while ensuring that their infrastructure meets their own business objectives, realized through software-based automation, agility, and elasticity. Software-defined network infrastructure, exemplified by SDN and by the virtualization of network and security services, can provide a crucial foundation for isolated, multitenant cloud services that scale to meet a growing range of enterprise customer needs while allowing the CSP to realize significant business value in the form of opex and capex savings IDC #

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