The Network Shift to Software: It's still about speeds, feeds, and cost

#SDN #Cloud #SDDC #SDAS What's changed is that the focus - from switch ports to services.

There is no doubt that a focus on software defining the network - enabling automation, analytics, and orchestration via open APIs and other technologies  - is changing the way network elements are viewed and compared across the industry.

In the past, we lined up products and compared the basics: speeds, feeds, and cost. The network elements in question had better perform at line rate (speeds). have a port density (feeds), and be affordable (price per port).

Many experts claim the shift from hardware to software is changing that focus. And they are right, at least on the surface. We're no longer so worried about speeds, feeds and costs in terms of network ports but we are, as we shift toward a software-defined world, concerned with service speeds, feeds, and costs.

After all, a significant impetus in the industry to move toward software is the impedance to continuous delivery practices caused by the much lower service velocity in the network as compared to application development and operations (devops).

	Hardware	Software
Speed	Port speed	Service provisioning speed
Feeds	Port Density	API capabilities
Cost	Price per port	Price per service

 

It's still all about speeds, feeds, and costs. We're trying to reduce costs of network services which, after all, impacts the business' bottom line. To do that, we have to improve network feeds such that integration and collaboration across the network, compute, and storage fabrics so that automation and orchestration can be enabled. Because that is one of the primary ways we increase speed in the network, improving how fast network services can be provisioned - hopefully as fast as applications are moving from application development through operations to the network.

SDN, SDDC and Cloud are still all about speeds, feeds, and cost. It's merely the case that as the focus of network deployment, integration and management shifts to software, so too must the criteria by which we measure the capabilities of the network.