Tag Archives: Software Defined WAN

Sorting Through SD-WAN

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lightspeed

SD-WAN has finally arrived. We’re not longer talking about it in terms of whether or not it is a thing that’s going to happen, but a thing that will happen provided the budgets are right. But while the concept of SD-WAN is certain, one must start to wonder about what’s going to happen to the providers of SD-WAN services.

Any Which Way You Can

I’ve written a lot about SDN and SD-WAN. SD-WAN is the best example of how SDN should be marketed to people. Instead of talking about features like APIs, orchestration, and programmability, you need to focus on the right hook. Do you see a food processor by talking about how many attachments it has? Or do you sell a Swiss Army knife by talking about all the crazy screwdrivers it holds? Or do you simply boil it down to “This thing makes your life easier”?

The most successful companies have made the “easier” pitch the way forward. Throwing a kitchen sink at people doesn’t make them buy a whole kitchen. But showing them how easy and automated you can make installation and management will sell boxes by the truckload. You have to appeal the opposite nature that SD-WAN was created to solve. WANs are hard, SD-WANs make them easy.

But that only works if your SD-WAN solution is easy in the first place. The biggest, most obvious target is Cisco IWAN. I will be the first to argue that the reason that Cisco hasn’t captured the SD-WAN market is because IWAN isn’t SD-WAN. It’s a series of existing technologies that were brought together to try and make and SD-WAN competitor. IWAN has all the technical credibility of a laboratory full of parts of amazing machines. What it lacks is any kind of ability to tie all that together easily.

IWAN is a moving target. Which platform should I use? Do I need this software to make it run correctly? How do I do zero-touch deployments? Or traffic control? How do I plug a 4G/LTE modem into the router? The answers to each of these questions involves typing commands or buying additional software features. That’s not the way to attack the complexity of WANs. In fact, it feeds into that complexity even more.

Cisco needs to look at a true SD-WAN technology. That likely means acquisition. Sure, it’s going to be a huge pain to integrate an acquisition with other components like APIC-EM, but given the lead that other competitors have right now, it’s time for Cisco to come up with a solution that knocks the socks off their longtime customers. Or face the very real possibility of not having longtime customers any longer.

Every Which Way But Loose

The first-generation providers of SD-WAN bounced onto the scene to pick up the pieces from IWAN. Names like Viptela, VeloCloud, CloudGenix, Versa Networks, and more. But, aside from all managing to build roughly the same platform with very similar features, they’ve hit a might big wall. They need to start making money in order for these gambles to pay off. Some have customers. Others are managing the migration into other services, like catering their offerings toward service providers. Still others are ripe acquisition targets for companies that lack an SD-WAN strategy, like HPE or Dell. I expect to see some fallout from the first generation providers consolidating this year.

The second generation providers, like Riverbed and Silver Peak, all have something in common. They are building on a business they’ve already proven. It’s no coincidence that both Riverbed and Silver Peak are the most well-known names in WAN optimization. How well known? Even major Cisco partners will argue that they sell these two “best of breed” offerings over Cisco’s own WAAS solution. Riverbed and Silver Peak have a definite advantage because they have a lot of existing customers that rely on WAN optimization. That market alone is going to net them a significant number of customers over the next few years. They can easily sell SD-WAN as the perfect addition to make WAN optimization even easier.

The third category of SD-WAN providers is the late comers. I still can’t believe it, but I’ve been reading about providers that aren’t traditional companies trying to get into the space. Talk about being the ninth horse in an eight horse race. Honestly, at this point you’re better off plowing your investment money into something else, like Internet of Things or Virtual Reality. There’s precious little room among the existing first generation providers and the second generation stalwarts. At best, all you can hope for is a quick exit. At worst, your “novel” technology will be snapped up for pennies after you’re bankrupt and liquidating everything but the standing desks.

Tom’s Take

Why am I excited about the arrival of SD-WAN? Because now I can finally stop talking about it! In all seriousness, when the boardroom starts talking about things that means it’s past the point of being a hobby project and now has become a real debate. SD-WAN is going to change one of the most irritating aspects of networking technology for us. I can remember trying to study for my CCNP and cramming all the DSL and T1 knowledge a person could fit into a brain in my head. Now, it’s all point-and-click and done. IPSec VPNs, traffic analytics, and application identification are so easy it’s scary. That’s the power of SD-WAN to me. Easy to use and easy to extend. I think that the landscape of providers of SD-WAN technologies is going to look vastly different by the end of 2017. But SD-WAN is going to be here for the long haul.

Is The Rise Of SD-WAN Thanks To Ethernet?

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Ethernet

SD-WAN has exploded in the market. Everywhere I turn, I see companies touting their new strategy for reducing WAN complexity, encrypting data in flight, and even doing analytics on traffic to help build QoS policies and traffic shaping for critical links. The first demo I ever watched for SDN was a WAN routing demo that chose best paths based on cost and time-of-day. It was simple then, but that kind of thinking has exploded in the last 5 years. And it’s all thanks to our lovable old friend, Ethernet.

Those Old Serials

When I started in networking, my knowledge was pretty limited to switches and other layer 2 devices. I plugged in the cables, and the things all worked. As I expanded up the OSI model, I started understanding how routers worked. I knew about moving packets between different layer 3 areas and how they controlled broadcast storms. This was also around the time when layer 3 switching was becoming a big thing in the campus. How was I supposed to figure out the difference between when I should be using a big router with 2-3 interfaces versus a switch that had lots of interfaces and could route just as well?

The key for me was media types. Layer 3 switching worked very well as long as you were only connecting Ethernet cables to the device. Switches were purpose built for UTP cable connectivity. That works really well for campus networks with Cat 5/5e/6 cabling. Switched Virtual Interfaces (SVIs) can handle a large amount of the routing traffic.

For WAN connectivity, routers were a must. Because only routers were modular in a way that accepted cards for different media types. When I started my journey on WAN connectivity, I was setting up T1 lines. Sometimes they had an old-fashioned serial connector like this:

s-l300

Those connected to external CSU/DSU modules. Those were a pain to configure and had multiple points of failure. Eventually, we moved up in the world to integrated CSU/DSU modules that looked like this:

ehwic-2-ports-t-1-e-1

Those are really awesome because all the configuration is done on the interface. They also take regular UTP cables instead of those crazy V.35 monsters.

cisco_v35_old_large

But those UTP cables weren’t Ethernet. Those were still designed to be used as serial connections.

It wasn’t until the rise of MPLS circuits and Transparent LAN services that Ethernet became the dominant force in WAN connectivity. I can still remember turning up my first managed circuit and thinking, “You mean I can use both FastEthernet interfaces? No cards? Wow!”.

Today, Ethernet dominates the landscape of connectivity. Serial WAN interfaces are relegated to backwater areas where you can’t get “real WAN connectivity”. And in most of those cases, the desire to use an old, slow serial circuit can be superseded by a 4G/LTE USB modem that can be purchased from almost any carrier. It would appear that serial has joined the same Heap of History as token ring, ARCnet, and other venerable connectivity options.

Rise, Ethernet

The ubiquity of Ethernet is a huge boon to SD-WAN vendors. They no longer have to create custom connectivity options for their appliances. They can provide 3-4 Ethernet interfaces and 2-3 USB slots and cover a wide range of options. This also allows them to simplify their board designs. No more modular chassis. No crazy requirements for WIC slots, NM slots, or any other crazy terminology that Cisco WAN engineers are all too familiar with.

Ethernet makes sense for SD-WAN vendors because they aren’t concerned with media types. All their intelligence resides in the software running on the box. They’d rather focus on creating automatic certificate-based IPsec VPNs than figuring out the clock rate on a T1 line. Hardware is not their end goal. It is much easier to order a reference board from Intel and plug it into a box than trying to configure a serial connector and make a custom integration.

Even SD-WAN vendors that are chasing after the service provider market are benefitting from Ethernet ubiquity. Service providers may still run serial connections in their networks, but management of those interfaces at the customer side is a huge pain. They require specialized technical abilities. It’s expensive to manage and difficult to troubleshoot remotely. Putting Ethernet handoffs at the CPE side makes life much easier. In addition, making those handoffs Ethernet makes it much easier to offer in-line service appliances, like those of SD-WAN vendors. It’s a good choice all around.

Serial connectivity isn’t going away any time soon. It fills an important purpose for high-speed connectivity where fiber isn’t an option. It’s also still a huge part of the install base for circuits, especially in rural areas or places where new WAN circuits aren’t easily run. Traditional routers with modular interfaces are still going to service a large number of customers. But Ethernet connectivity is quickly growing to levels where it will eclipse these legacy serial circuits soon. And the advantage for SD-WAN vendors can only grow with it.

Tom’s Take

Ethernet isn’t the only reason SD-WAN has succeeded. Ease of use, huge feature set, and flexibility are the real reasons when SD-WAN has moved past the concept stage and into deployment. WAN optimization now has SD-WAN components. Service providers are looking to offer it as a value added service. SD-WAN has won out on the merits of the technology. But the underlying hardware and connectivity was radically simplified in the last 5-7 years to allow SD-WAN architects and designers to focus on the software side of things instead of the difficulties of building complicated serial interfaces. SD-WAN may not owe it’s entire existence to Ethernet, but it got a huge push in the right direction for sure.

This WAN Is Your WAN, This WAN Is My WAN

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Straw Bales on Hill Landscape, Tuscany, Italy

Straw Bales on Hill Landscape, Tuscany, Italy

Ideas coalesce all the time in every vertical. You don’t really notice it until you wake up one day and suddenly everything around you looks identical. Wireless becoming the new access layer. Flash storage taking hold of the high end performance crown. And in networking we have the dominance of all things software defined. One recent development has coming along much faster than anyone could have predicted: Software Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN).

Automatic For The People

SD-WAN is a force in modern networking because people want simplicity. While Ivan does a great job of decoupling marketing from reality, people still believe that SD-WAN is the silver bullet that will fix all of their WAN woes. Even during the original discussions of SD-WAN technology at conferences like ONUG, the overriding idea wasn’t around tying sites together or driving down costs to the point of feasibility. It was all about making life easier.

How does SD-WAN manage to accomplish this? It’s all black box networking. Just like the fuel injector in your car. There’s no crying about interoperability or standards-based protocols. You just plug things in and it all works, even if you can’t exactly plug one vendor solution into a competitor. Lock in wins again.

The ideas behind SD-WAN aren’t exactly new. Cisco talked about SD-WAN quite a bit at Networking Field Day 10. Here’s Jeff Reed on it:

The rest of the two hour session details how Cisco is using their Intelligent WAN (IWAN) product to drive SD-WAN. The names of the components all sound very familiar to networkers: DMVPN, NBAR, PfR, and so on. That’s because SD-WAN uses a lot of tried-and-true techniques to tie the concept together. There’s nothing earth-shattering about SD-WAN under the hood. In fact, a fair number of people that work at the “pioneering” SD-WAN startups all seem to have their roots in one or more traditional networking companies.

Fables of Reconstruction

Look at the other presenters at Networking Field Day 10. Two of them announced SD-WAN solutions even though they aren’t really known for expertise in SD-WAN. One of them wasn’t even known as a branch office acceleration solution. So why the SD-WAN land rush all of the sudden? What’s behind the need to have a solution?

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a lot of investors are backing expansion into SD-WAN technologies. It’s a hot property. But why? As above, customers aren’t interested in the technical wizardry that goes into SD-WAN. They aren’t clamoring for it to supplant their current WAN solution and offer a Rosetta Stone of inter-vendor WAN cooperation. What’s behind the push?

It probably goes something like this:

  1. Technologist needs to implement WAN architecture. Is dismayed that things are so difficult.
  2. Technologist starts searching for solutions about WAN. They probably start asking friends about it.
  3. Analyst firm hears that technologists are asking about WAN solutions. Releases a questionnaire asking which technologies you’d like to learn more about.
  4. Responses to questionnaires are loaded into a graph or report that people buy because they don’t know who to talk to.
  5. Companies realize customers want WAN solutions. They break their necks to offer those solutions to keep up with demand.
  6. Investors see companies beginning to offer WAN solutions and think there’s a huge untapped market. They start funding anyone that mentions WAN in a meeting.

By the way, you can replace “WAN” with any technology above and it still works.

Thanks to customers needing a solution for something they can’t configure easily they are going to be inundated with SD-WAN options by the time they turn around. And the biggest concern no long becomes “Who has the easiest solution?” but instead, “Who is still going to be here in six months?”

Collapse Into Now

The reckoning is coming in the SD-WAN market. If a company doesn’t already have an SD-WAN solution in development or if their solution won’t see daylight for another nine months, they are going to exercise the second “B” of innovation and buy it. And they have a lot of prime targets to choose from.

Investors get cagey without an exit strategy. How are they going to win at this game? They either have to get paid with an IPO, with a later round of funding, or by having someone buy out the investment. If an investor thinks they can get their money back (plus a bit of interest) by having this little startup bought by a traditional networking vendor you can better believe they will be advising the startup to sell.

The customers are the real losers in the case of a buyout, or worse a bankruptcy. Those highly proprietary solutions become dead weight if there isn’t any support for them any longer. Black box networking falls apart when the little magical creatures inside the box go away. Which means customers will be skittish of supporting a solution that is likely to go away any time soon.

Who will you support? An established vendor slow to roll out a solution? Or an up-and-coming company with new ideas but at risk of being snapped up by a big bank account?

Tom’s Take

I loved seeing all the SD-WAN discussion at Networking Field Day 10. SD-WAN is no longer magic sauce that aggregates DSL and MPLS circuits with encryption. Nuage Networks showed off deploying Docker apps to remote sites. Riverbed talked about using their WAN optimization experience to deploy SaaS solutions through SD-WAN.

We’ve heard from SD-WAN companies in the past at Networking Field Day. It’s interesting to hear the comparisons between the upstarts and the old geezers. It’s clear there is a ton of money that is being invested in SD-WAN. The trick is to find out your needs and pick the best solution for you. Otherwise you may find yourself losing your SD-WAN religion.

 

Riding the SD-WAN Wave

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Software Defined Networking has changed the way that organizations think about their network infrastructure.  Companies are looking at increasing automation of mundane tasks, orchestration of policy, and even using white box switches with the help of new unbound operating systems.  A new class of technologies that is coming to market hopes to reduce complexity and cost for the Achilles Heel of many enterprises: the Wide Area Network (WAN).

Do You WANt To Build A Snowman?

The WAN has always been a sore spot for enterprise networks.  It’s necessary to connect your organization to the world.  If you have remote sites or branch locations, it is critical for daily operations.  If you have an e-commerce footprint your WAN connection needs to be able to handle the generated traffic.  But good WAN connectivity costs money.  Lots of money.

WAN protocols are constantly being refined to come up with the fastest possible transmission and the highest possible uptime.  Frame Relay, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) are a succession of technologies that have shaped enterprise WAN connectivity for over a decade.  They have their strengths and weaknesses.  But it is difficult to build an enterprise WAN without one.

Some customers can’t get MPLS connectivity.  Or even Frame Relay for the matter.  Their locations are too remote or the cost of having the connection installed is far above the return on investment.  These customers are often forced to resort to consumer-class connections, like cable modems, Digital Subscriber Line (DSL), or even 4G/LTE modem uplinks.  While cheaper and easy to install, these solutions are often not as robust as their business-grade counterparts.  And when it comes to support on a down circuit…

Redefining the WAN

How does Software Defined WAN (SD-WAN) help?  SD-WAN technologies from companies like Silver Peak, CloudGenix, and Viptela function like overlay networks for the WAN.  They take the various inputs that you have, such as MPLS, cable, and 4G/LTE networks.  These inputs are then arranged in such a way as to allow you to intelligently program how traffic will behave on the links.  If you want only critical business traffic on the MPLS circuit during business hours you can do that.  If you want to ensure the 4G/LTE uplink is only used in the event of an emergency outage, you can do that too.  You can even program various costs and metrics into the system to help you make decisions about when a given link would be a better economic decision given the time of day or amount of transferred data.

You’re probably saying to yourself, “But I can do all of that today.” And you would be right. But all of this has to happen manually, or at the least require a lot of programming.  If you’ve ever tried to configure OER/PFR on a Cisco router you know what I’m talking about.  And that’s just one vendor’s equipment.  What if there are multiple devices in play?  How do you configure the edge routers for fifty sites?  What happens when a circuit goes down at 3 a.m.?  Having a simple interface for making decisions or even the ability to script actions based on inputs makes the system much more flexible and responsive.

It all comes down to a simple number for all parties involved.  For engineering, the amount of time spent configuring and maintaining complex WAN connectivity will be reduced.  Engineers love not needing to spend time on things.  For the decision makers (and bean counters), it all comes down to money.  SD-WAN technologies reduce costs by better utilizing existing infrastructure.  Eventually, their analysis can allow you to reduce or remove unnecessary connectivity.  That means more money in the pockets of the people that want the money.

Tom’s Take

I’ve referred to WAN applications as the “hello world” for SDN.  That’s because I saw so many people demoing them when SDN was first being talked about.  Cisco did this at Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego.  SD-WAN didn’t really become a concrete thing in my mind until is was the topic of discussion on the Spring ONUG meeting.  Those are the people with the money.  And they are looking at the cost savings and optimization from SD-WAN technologies.  You can better believe that the first wave of SD-WAN that you’ve seen in the last couple of months is just the precursor to a wider look at connectivity in general.  Better get ready to surf.