WHITE PAPER

Anuta nCloudX Roadmap to SDN

Abstract

Software Defined Networking (SDN) was conceived to alleviate the challenges related to networks in
the cloud. The industry will need at least few more years to develop ubiquitous SDN support.
Meanwhile, the cloud administrator has to deal with the complexity.

The Anuta nCloudX platform allows customers to manage both traditional networking and evolving
SDN technologies as a unified set of network services orchestrated in a single, cohesive manner.
Bridging this gap automates the cloud across the infrastructure stack for heterogeneous networks
allowing customers to blend the right combination of multi-vendor solutions to meet their business
demands.

Anuta Networks
1851 McCarthy Blvd, #207
Milpitas, CA 95035
sales@anutanetworks.com
Tel: +1 408 458 7955
2012 Anuta Networks, Inc. Fax:+1 408 872 4173
www.anutanetworks.com
 Confidential

Introduction
Over the years, IT infrastructure has evolved from a largely static entity to an increasingly dynamic
one where clients are demanding new services of IT departments while maintaining SLAs. To
accommodate that shift IT departments have moved towards public and private clouds while
extensively leveraging server virtualization and providing flexibility for hosting applications. While
server virtualization has continued its rapid adoption, the bottleneck facing IT departments in most
cases is the network.

The network has largely been a static entity where the capabilities delivered depend on the software
hosted on the particular set of devices. Such static setup has resulted in the network being the
bottleneck in the adoption of cloud computing. Today, configuring new applications for clients
requires multiple levels of network configuration related to ACL, QoS, VLANs etc. All these
configurations are complex, cumbersome, manual and error-prone.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) was conceived to alleviate the problem related to networks as
it relates to cloud. SDN is an approach to building networks that separates the control plane from
the data plane. This architecture allows network administrators to have programmable central
control of network traffic without requiring physical access to the network's hardware devices.

Promise of SDN
Lower TCO: Since the control and data plane are separated, SDN leverages various programmatic
interfaces and consolidates all the control to a single point thereby alleviating the need for complex
and error prone configuration. The increased usage lowers the total cost of ownership of any
software-defined network.

Elasticity: The software defined network is completely elastic. SDN offers flexibility to dynamically
configure networks as per demand. And, this ability to provision network services on-demand is
much more efficient than any type of demand forecasting.

Resource Pooling: SDN optimizes infrastructure use by abstracting the control and data planes and
reduces OPEX through resource pooling. By consolidating more services, cloud providers can achieve
economies of scale and deliver resources to tenants dynamically while enforcing policies and
compliance.

Self-Service: SDN abstracts the networks and integrates with cloud portals to offer self-service
catalogs. Tenants can select appropriate network services such as firewalls and application delivery

2013 Anuta Networks, Inc. 1

 Confidential

controllers for their deployment in the cloud. The simplified workflow improves customer
satisfaction while reducing OPEX for the provider.

Barriers to SDN adoption

While SDN offers many benefits, there are significant barriers to overcome.

Multiple Vendors Todays data centers are extremely complex with different types of networking
equipment - switches, routers, application delivery controllers and firewalls. Each type of network
equipment is potentially sourced from a different vendor (e.g Cisco ASA, F5 Load Balancer and
Riverbed WAN accelerator and HP switches) each with different operating systems and has to be
managed differently using CLI, XML or REST API.

Configuration Complexity Todays networks are largely static entities and addition of each service
or application requires changes on possibly multiple devices and also multiple types of configuration
e.g. QoS, ACL, VLAN etc. All these configurations are manual and highly complex, which significantly
increase the time to deploy new services and are highly error prone.

Form Factor - The problems with todays networks are further complicated due to the form-factor.
Some virtual appliances such as virtual firewalls, virtual load balancers are introduced. The virtual
form factor offers great flexibility, but at the same time creates huge management challenges.

Management - While there are few converged infrastructures such as VMDC, FlexPod and VBLOC,
management is still a challenge. The network administrator has to invest hundreds of hours to
orchestrate services across multiple network elements and there is a significant lack of tools to
automate network service virtualization.

Roadmap to delivering a better cloud

Cloud providers trying to optimize their cloud offerings should embark on a strategic sequence of
steps to achieving an efficient cloud.

Service Delivery Automation Phase

The first step is to automate the service delivery.
1. There should be a provision to publish service and resources as part of a service catalog and
integrated with cloud portals such as VMware VCD, Microsoft System Center, CloudStack and
OpenStack etc.

2013 Anuta Networks, Inc. 2

 Confidential

2. When a tenant requests a service, the solution should be able to find the optimal data center
and provision resources across various physical and virtual network elements. If there are
any errors during the service provisioning phase, the solution should rollback changes
automatically.
3. Finally, when a tenant decides to decommission the service, it should be feasible to undo all
the provisioning and reclaim resources.

Service Assurance Phase

The second step is to ensure service guarantee.
1. The administrators should be able to monitor their data center resource usage and should
have the information necessary to plan the capacity for better business decisions.
2. The administrators should be able to figure out which tenant is associated with which
services and then which resources are used to provision those services.
3. The automation tool should monitor alarms from various network devices and proactively
notify the affected tenants.
4. The automation tool should be up-to-date with new versions of various devices and be able
to support best-of-breed networks.
5. Administrators need complete governance to audit and authorize workflows to minimize
service disruption.
6. The automation tool should have role based administration and flexibility to host tenants
while ensuring secure multi-tenancy.

Service Monetization Phase

The final step is to monetize the network services.
1. After the cloud administrators gain control of their network and have visibility to their
capacity and resource usage, they can plan and optimize the network.
2. At the same time, they can also offer differentiated services through monetization of
network resources. For example, they can charge premium for the ability to configure
tenants own firewall rules, load-balancer properties and log collection.

Evolving Data Center Networks

As the technologies mature, we will see more and more virtualized services Virtual Switch, Virtual
Router, Virtual Firewall, Virtual Load-balancers and Virtual Application Accelerators. At the same
time, the need for performance and advanced functionality require dedicated ASIC based physical
equipment. The future datacenter will have a mix of best-of-breed physical devices and virtual
network service nodes.

2013 Anuta Networks, Inc. 3

 Confidential

Just as in storage, it is important for the cloud providers to abstract the functionality to a logical
element that can be used to chain services across physical and virtual network stack. At the same
time, new datacenters are built with completely new technology such as OpenFlow.

The data center admins need a strategy to expose both the traditional and next-gen data center
resources to the same cloud portal. Then, as new technologies catch up with features, it would be
possible to migrate tenants from old data center to the new data centers without user disruption.

The Anuta nCloudX platform

The Anuta Networks nCloudX platform allows customers to manage both traditional networking and
evolving software defined networking technologies as a unified set of network services orchestrated
in a uniform and cohesive manner. Bridging this gap automates the Cloud across the infrastructure
stack for heterogeneous networks allowing customers to blend the right combination of multi-
vendor solutions to meet their growing business demands.

Our unique approach encapsulates and abstracts traditional physical networking, emerging virtual
networking and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies into a programmable service
layer. This abstraction creates a logical, interrelated service definition and management layer across
heterogeneous networking technologies.

2013 Anuta Networks, Inc. 4

 Confidential

By encapsulating these disparate networking technologies into a unified service tier, the Anuta
nCloudX platform insulates other cloud service tiers from the underlying technology implementation
as well as future technology decisions in the network infrastructure. This encapsulation provides
freedom to choose best of breed and evolving networking technologies all managed through a
single pane of glass.

Our unique network service design, service provisioning orchestration, and service monitoring
approach starts with our easy to use Service Designer that allows administrators to drag-and-drop
service items onto a design surface to simplify the creation of complex network configurations
spanning various devices, technologies, and vendors in minutes.

Once a Tenant requests a new service from the Catalog, Anuta nCloudX orchestrates the
heterogeneous setup that can automate hundreds of steps previously performed manually. Finally,
Anuta nCloudX monitors the performance, health, and availability of the service end-to-end across
the disparate physical devices and maps this back to the logical Services and Tenants.

Summary
Software Defined Networking (SDN) was conceived to alleviate the challenges related to networks in
the cloud. The industry will need at least few more years to develop ubiquitous SDN support.
Meanwhile, the cloud administrator has to deal with the complexity.

The Anuta nCloudX platform allows customers to manage both traditional networking and evolving
SDN technologies as a unified set of network services orchestrated in a single, cohesive manner.
Bridging this gap automates the cloud across the infrastructure stack for heterogeneous networks
allowing customers to blend the right combination of multi-vendor solutions to meet their business
demands.

Please contact us for more information on how Anuta Networks can help you scale and accelerate
your Cloud deployment.

Anuta Networks
Anuta Networks, Inc. All rights reserved. Anuta, Anuta
1851 McCarthy Blvd, #207
Networks and the Anuta Networks logo are trademarks of
Milpitas, CA 95035
Anuta Networks, Inc. in the USA. All other company and
sales@anutanetworks.com
product names may be trademarks of their respective
2013 Anuta Networks, Inc. Tel: +1 4085 458 7955
companies.
Fax:+1 408 872 4173
www.anutanetworks.com