What to expect from SDN and data centers in 2016
Editor’s Note: With 2016 now upon us, RCR Wireless News has gathered predictions from leading industry analysts and executives on what they expect to see in the new year.
In 2015, service providers, telecom operators, and national research and engineering consortiums went through a major transition as they began implementing software-defined networks to deliver high performance and massive scale in both the data center and WANs.
The following list of predictions will impact large organizations and national research groups in 2016.
FPGAs grow up and play a much larger role in data centers
Network engineers need flexible, open hardware to create policy-driven, self-tuning networks. Hardware vendors need design cycles that can keep pace with network innovations and changes demanded by the network engineers. The old way of waiting for fixed function ASICs is too much waiting for too rigid a product. Field programmable gate arrays have advanced to the point where their underlying silicon process technology is in lockstep with ASICs while users benefit from the combined volume of all other users of the same platform. This means they are as performant and affordable as ASICs while offering full flexibility and rapid design cycles. With this shift in FPGAs, data center architectures can rapidly evolve and scale.
SDN will emerge from the hype cycle, based on real deployments
There are now confirmed scheduled deployments of SDN in service providers, Internet exchanges, Internet service providers and data centers. What’s common to all of them is the top to bottom solution is an integration of SDN orchestration, control and data plane elements. This cumbersome stitching together of various parts of the equation has delayed real deployments as much as the lack of controllers and real SDN hardware that are performant and open. With the missing pieces available and a top to bottom offering of interworking parts, real deployments will accelerate beyond just the early, most sophisticated users and find themselves in a broad base of networks of different shapes and sizes.
Reprogrammable networks and real time analytics will be hot topics for 2016
You program the network to begin with; you reprogram it to make it better. To really create agile, self-tuning, automated networks that create value for providers and users alike, you need a virtuous circle of real-time statistics feeding into real-time analytics tools that trigger changes, which are immediately programmed into the network. To date, these tools existed, but in isolation of each other. Now we see the beginnings of offerings that have created linkages to move towards closing the circle. Through industry partnerships or as vertically integrated solutions from a single vendor, the ability to reprogram the network on the fly is showing up and getting lots of interest from service providers, broadcasters, municipalities and enterprises, to name a few. All of them share a common requirement of needing to count and know what is going on in their networks so they can take the appropriate next action: Isolate? Allocate bandwidth? Add/offer a service? Look for much discussion and some innovative deployments of reprogrammable networks.
The year of 100G SDN
One hundred gigabit will begin to ramp aggressively because both the data drivers and the underlying network have reached a critical junction. Traffic growth on the network continues to put pressure on network infrastructure, and will be even more significant with 100G storage deploying to add to the massive growth in video and “Internet of Things” generated traffic. Operators will be able to answer with 100G SDN because of two key enablers: affordability, as 100G SDN deployments is approaching a price point that is barely three-times what a 10G link would cost; and flexible feeds and speeds with QSFP28 for 100G, SFP+ for 10G and anything in between possible with the same optics cage. Programmable SDN hardware designed with these cages can deploy as 10G initially and then rapidly move from 10G to 100G with a soft upgrade not a new hardware purchase to immediately address the data demands.
