Should you opt for converged infrastructure or SDN?

MUMBAI, INDIA: Static architectures are ill-suited for today’s highly mobile and virtualized environments.The proliferation of data and the growing number of devices will demand agile networks for rapid responses that support business growth.

Agility in the network allows applications and services to be added, removed or adjusted promptly. Yet, organizations are faced with the inherent decision of determining what should be outsourced and what should be insourced. Although costs will be an underlying factor, the need to identify investment into parts of the technology infrastructure that are strategic to the business while outsourcing the rest, will be crucial.

Gartner has projected that IT spending in India for 2015 will increase by 9.4 percent to $73.3 billion—with $2.37 billion investments on data centers alone. How will new applications, users and services be removed or merged within the organization’s own IT infrastructure?

Therefore, the question organizations should be asking is–whether to bring the pieces closer together by deploying a converged infrastructure, or disaggregate and have more moving pieces with the deployment of software-defined networking (SDN)?

Let’s take a closer look.

Challenges of traditional networking
The network infrastructure that organizations rely on must be more agile than it is today in order to support the pace of the ever-changing business landscape. Yet, many do not recognize the issues with traditional networking.

For a start, it is difficult and time consuming to change and adapt the infrastructure due to the complexity of the network. The same can also be said about the constant implementation of new technology features that require time before end user benefits can be realized.

Furthermore, network intelligence tends to be too siloed from applications, preventing organizations to benefit from the presence of valuable and relevant data in the respective systems. Networking hardware is also too often closed or static, thereby limiting future scaling or enhancements of the data center.

The problem with traditional networking should now be apparent. The network should be an asset to the organization to drive innovation forward, yet it often holds other efforts back or slows them down. How can organizations address these issues between the differing trends of deploying a converged infrastructure or SDN?

Closed integration with converged infrastructures
Deploying converged infrastructure removes a layer of complexity when data center configuration is abstracted by pre-assembling the components so organizations don’t have to deal with the pieces. This ensures that tighter integrations are built along with pre-configuring of the pieces–storage, networks, and compute servers–with different applications and uses in mind.

With the pieces being integrated and working collectively at optimal capacity, organizations are able to streamline day-to-day management of their data center. Organizations also benefit from reduced costs that would otherwise be spent on single-use components that are required in the managing or troubleshooting of these pieces. By consolidating resources and outsourcing the network complexity, the time taken to build and scale the data centers is significantly reduced.

Open disaggregation with SDN
Then there is SDN, which in most architectures disaggregates networking and IT intelligence into separate pieces in order to create more layers of abstraction and thus increase agility and levels of control and automation.SDN allows the option to separate networking intelligence from networking hardware which cannot be achieved with traditional routers and switches that have mutually exclusive software embedded within the hardware.

With software not being bound to a networking operating system or control plane, opportunities to leverage new innovations faster will arise. The most extreme incarnation of the SDN model has the potential to add complexity, but also to increase agility and choice, and thus addresses many of the challenges listed above.

Conflicting trends or differing needs?
To the uninitiated, these may seem like opposing approaches: integrate and bring the pieces together, or disaggregate and have more moving pieces. Yet, from what has been identified, there are different advantages in the deployment of each trend.

Organizations that are interested in getting things up and running quickly may go to the most converged infrastructure available, while those interested in open and dynamic networks that can leverage new innovations faster will look to SDN.

The article has been authored by Mohamed Asiq, Regional Director, India and Saarc, Extreme Networks, and opnions expressed are his own