In the more established area of server virtualisation we now have something of a battle going on between VMs and containers, says O’Haire. “I think myself they will co-exist. In networking, I think right now we can do some great things without trying to boil the ocean. There are a lot of SDN standards that are not fully resolved yet, like OpenFlow versus others that have not even appeared yet. At the software layer the network is extensible, open in terms of APIs and programmable. One of the biggest drivers of SDN, server virtualisation, almost demands it because prevailing network architecture is so static and requires a different management layer while the server guys are used to moving things around all the time in a dynamic and highly automated environment.”
“That is a factor in what I think is the most exciting thing right now, hyper-convergence. It’s still at a very early stage but we are seeing great advances and in fact great uptake, led by Nutanix and others and with SD Storage as a major driver. When we have compute, storage and network fully software-defined, which is close, the next big step will be programmability in orchestration and automation,” O’Haire believes.
For the data storage and network layers, life is not yet simple. Policy-based storage is working quite well but it is predicated on well managed storage tiers underneath — better managed than it always is — and so is still largely for big outfits, Matthew Sherian, Asystec
Containerisation
Accepting that “we’ve got it” at the compute layer, Asystec solutions architect Matthew Sherian believes that containerisation is the next big thing in virtualisation. “Even VMs are a little long lived for app-centric deployments. With Docker and an estate of VMs you do not even have the overhead of cloning. As for the data storage and network layers, life is not yet simple. Policy-based storage is working quite well but it is predicated on well managed storage tiers underneath — better managed than it always is — and so is still largely for big outfits.”
“Software defined networking is less complicated in smaller organisations, say under 1,000 to 2,000 users,” Sherian says. “You can take existing vLANs and vCNS and incorporate them into the software stack and offer pass-through firewall devices at the edge and end user micro segments for security. There is something of a cultural issue with network specialists who need to be convinced about how SDN is better.
“From an engineering point of view, the first reassurance is that they can do everything they can do today. Then the policy-guided stuff comes into play, with all the flexibility that we can use to leverage better performance across all aspects of the network. Active Directory, or in fact any generic user authentication or directory service, can serve the security and access permissions. With the rules in place, allocation of resources of all kinds becomes automatic. That is a key driver for private cloud development.”
Test and dev
One key thing that Sherian points to as there is more and more widespread adoption of the stack of software defined services in the data centre is test and development. “We are all accustomed to the T&D environment looking very little like the production destination and then when something goes wrong later we say it could not have been foreseen. I don’t think we are going to see that much anymore because we can test in the same environment as production, just a smaller version. You can provide all of the same services that the production version will work with, from databases to network or whatever. Then in due course you just deploy it as another element in your services stack.”
We are seeing both interest and traction in software defined anything and everything. For us, it all fits perfectly around x86 platforms and servers that support the new wave of software defined enterprise systems as they will sit on that compute layer. At the compute layer, it is already mature and offers the building blocks for everything else SD, Niamh Townsend, Dell
Dell is a company with a global overview and it is interesting that Niamh Townsend, its enterprise solutions director for Ireland, says that “We are seeing both interest and traction in software defined anything and everything. For us, it all fits perfectly with our open ecosystem position around x86 platforms and our 13g servers that support the new wave of software defined enterprise systems as they will sit on that compute layer. At the compute layer it is already mature and offers the building blocks for everything else software defined. We are offering options to customers around software defined and hyper-converged platforms in partnership with leaders like Nutanix and Nexenta, Cumulus Networks and of course VMware and Microsoft.”
Cloud enabler
“We see software defined as a cloud enabler rather than a competitor, offering a suitable platform to build cloud solutions. In storage, for example, we have worked closely with Microsoft to develop its cloud platform on Dell hardware—essentially an Azure-tested private cloud. At its heart is the Microsoft storage solution that can support up to 8,000 virtual servers. Back to reality in the Irish market, that means we have a reference architecture that can be sized to suit any enterprise. We are talking cloud-in-a-box at a price point around €20,000 – 25,000.”
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