The past year has been hectic. The industry spent 2014 writing about marketing trends, creating proof of concepts and making moves to prepare for 2015 – the year carriers will adopt SDN. SDN, or software-defined networking, provides many benefits to enterprises. If you aren’t familiar with SDN, now is the time to learn.
What exactly is SDN?
According to Wikipedia, SDN is:
“An approach to computer networking that allows network administrators to manage network services through abstraction of lower-level functionality. This is done by decoupling the system that makes decisions about where traffic is sent from the underlying systems that forward traffic to the selected destination.”
What does this mean in layman’s terms? Software can recognize trends and be programmed to automatically reach out and send requests to make a network change, without the need of a highly certified IT professional.
The Benefits of SDN
There are countless benefits to utilizing SDN. Here are just a few:
- Reduce WAN expertise and skillsets needed: Now most IT professionals can manage your network, without the need for a bunch of vendor or carrier based certifications.
- Save money on your WAN: You don’t have to buy large network capacity; you can simply pay on demand.
- Save money on equipment: With SDN, you don’t have to buy specific types of hardware. You can buy less expensive equipment and program it accordingly.
- Easy and quick: With SDN you can make changes to the network on-demand and on-the-fly.
- Better visibility and analytics: SDN helps you maintain control of end-points, data flows and network devices.
- Superior security: SDN is better for enterprises because of tighter security and control versus traditional network environments.
- Cut out the middleman: Network enterprise managers are able to make decisions based on business rules and applications through a portal, rather than calling a provider.
SDN In Action
Big Data Centers
The use of SDN was first adopted by big data centers as they transferred data to the cloud. Peak times (like 8 am – 5 pm) require more processing power to transmit data and can be very expensive. With SDN, they could seamlessly increase capacity during peak times and do it more efficiently.
For example, instead of sending data directly from New York to Chicago (a heavily used route), SDN allowed them to bypass major cities and take a less expensive route.
Accounting Firms
Large accounting firms like H&R Block® need a lot of processing power in April when they complete taxes for the masses. SDN allows them to easily buy more processing power during those peak times.
Credit Card Companies
MasterCard® needs to be able to handle the transactions on the busiest shopping day of the year: the Saturday before Christmas. SDN allows them to meet the demands of last minute Christmas shopping.
Cell Phone Carriers
SDN allows cell phone carriers to easily access the bandwidth they need to meet critical demand dates with large spikes in data usage, days like Mother’s Day, or activities like sporting events, concerts and conventions.
SDN and OcularIP™
OcularIP can provide the information you need to make decisions. OcularIP’s API (Application Facing Interface) into the industry’s major SDN providers brings all the pieces of the network together. It can automatically recognize the network issues such as bandwidth needs or degrading performance and send that information to SDN controllers to take the proper actions. And to make it even simpler, it ties back into billing and purchasing systems.
When you’re ready to make SDN work for you, contact the professionals at LB Networks to learn how OcularIP can help your enterprise.
