As the Irish distributor for Nutanix, O’Haire echoes Kaplan’s claim that it is generating a lot of interest from partners that have relationships with more established vendors. “A lot of them see the cracks appearing in the solution [they are selling] in terms of scalability. Customers are crying out for new technology.” He argues that incumbent storage vendors have a lot of baggage, so they can’t turn around and say everything they have done to date is all wrong. “Newer vendors have designed their solutions from the ground up with those technologies in mind and for the modern virtualised data centre as well,” he adds.
O’Haire questions whether the approach taken by traditional storage vendors to software defined actually meets the requirements. “A truly software defined solution might be delivered on a piece of hardware but it should be commodity hardware. When you get into proprietary hardware, you should be getting worried because it’s a complete lock in to the vendor. If you have software on commodity hardware, the vendor can move with the times and the platform for software defined moves with the times,” O’Haire argues.
“Widespread adoption of SDN is happening and is being driven by the user communities, not equipment manufacturers” – Jim Smith, Dell Networking
While SDS is the logical next step after compute, there’s no doubt that software defined networking (SDN) is a little bit further off. As Maner told the audience at VMWorld Barcelona 2013: “Software-defined networking is part of it, but I believe software-defined networking is the next 20 years. It’s difficult to do.”
Work in progress
Jim Smith, outside sales specialist for Dell Networking, says “there is no short answer” to the question of when SDN will become realisable. He claims there are “many definitions that tend to over complicate what it really is”. He defines SDN as “an architecture that will enable end-to-end connectivity through a network, allowing it to react dynamically to the demands of applications being delivered across it”. The SDN architecture is an evolving work in progress but one of its fundamental building blocks, the OpenFlow protocol, is already being used to control networks within data centres. In that context, “widespread adoption of SDN is happening and is being driven by the user communities, not equipment manufacturers”. Smith describes SDN as “a fundamental shift, turning from equipment manufacturer-led to customer demand”.
Andrew Chew, managing director for architectures at Cisco UK & Ireland, says the “days of ‘set and forget’ networking and storage management are over. In the same way as other industries have evolved to maximise resources, bandwidth and storage capacities must be used to their fullest”. Cisco’s response is the Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE) which, it claims, helps SDN networks to “become more open, programmable, and application-aware” by simplifying operations, delivering more advanced options for physical, virtual and cloud environments, while making the network more agile and application-centric.
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