Home EMEAEMEA 2014 Service Revolution

Service Revolution

by Administrator
Stephen DowIssue:EMEA 2014
Article no.:6
Topic:Service Revolution
Author:Stephen Dow
Title:President
Organisation:Artesyn Embedded Technologies
PDF size:183KB

About author

Stephen C. Dow is the President of Artesyn Embedded Technologies. Artesyn Embedded Technologies is the new name for the former Embedded Computing & Power business of Emerson Network Power. Artesyn is owned by Platinum Equity, a Los Angeles based private equity firm who acquired a majority interest in the company through a joint venture from Emerson in November 2013. Emerson retains a 49 percent non-controlling interest in the business, which now operates as an independent company.
Mr. Dow joined Emerson with its acquisition of Motorola’s Embedded Communications Computing group in January 2008. As vice president and general manager of Motorola’s embedded computing business, he was responsible for streamlining its operational efficiencies and continuing the organization’s positive momentum as a global leader in the embedded computing space.
Prior to Motorola, Mr. Dow held CEO positions for Espion International, as well as Channel Access – a sales, marketing and systems integration business serving manufacturers in the embedded computer space which he co-founded. He spent 14 years with Force Computers, prior to co-founding Channel Access. During his career with Force Computers, Mr. Dow progressed through several positions of increasing responsibility in sales and marketing, culminating as Chief Operating Officer and General Manager of the Americas. As COO, Mr. Dow was responsible for all operations of an international company which grew from under US$3 million in revenues to over US$150 million in revenues during his tenure.

Article abstract

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) are mutually beneficial, but are not dependent on one another. You do not need one to have the other. However, the reality is SDN makes NFV more compelling and vice-versa. The advancement these technologies is the key to evolving the network to keep pace with the innovations of all the people and devices its connecting.
Greater intelligence in the network could enable innovative services such as portable bandwidth and services. If you’re going on holiday, why do you have to pay for WiFi or pay TV again in a hotel when you’re not using them at home? That’s seamless mobility taken to a whole new level.

Full Article

Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) are complementary approaches that offer a new way to design deploy and manage networks and services. Where could these approaches merge?
For example, NFV could define the central control functions of SDN as virtual functions, so, for example, OpenFlow switches could be directed by NFV software. In theory, the SDN controller could be implemented as a virtual function, which would make it conform to both SDN and NFV.
Firewall and load-balancing applications are also targets of NFV since they have an SDN-like segregation of forwarding and control behaviours. Indeed, if NFV addresses the general case of policy-managed forwarding, it could define a superset of SDN.
NFV could also define central control and administration of networks that operate through other protocols, such as BGP and MPLS, and even define configuration and management of optical-layer transport.
While it may take some time before we see NFV play a key role in SDN architecture and vice versa, the use of network overlays in NFV will drive an intersection of the technologies in the shorter term.
NFV is likely to at least accept, if not mandate, a model of cloud-hosted virtual functions. Each collection of virtual functions that make up a user service could be viewed as a tenant on NFV infrastructure, which would mean that the cloud issues of multi-tenancy would likely influence NFV to adopt a software-overlay network model. This is where SDN comes into play.
This model, made up of tunnels and vSwitches, would segregate virtual functions to prevent accidental or malicious interaction, and it would link easily to current cloud computing virtual network interfaces. The virtual networks would be provisioned and managed using SDN.
Adoption of network overlays for virtual function segregation could make NFV the largest consumer of cloud networking and SDN services. This would mean that NFV could shape product features and accelerate product deployment in the SDN space. That alone could have an impact on every cloud computing data centre and application, including private and hybrid clouds.
SDN and NFV are mutually beneficial, but are not dependent on one another. You do not need one to have the other. However, the reality is SDN makes NFV more compelling and vice-versa. The advancement these technologies is the key to evolving the network to keep pace with the innovations of all the people and devices its connecting.
Scalability
Take for example a network function such as the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS). Instead of having one IMS per country, virtualization will enable carriers to run single, central instances.
Today, a global carrier may have separate IMS in all countries and in each case it may be a single vendor technology. Today, that carrier uses IMS mainly for offering VoIP to FTTH customers, but over time all the traffic that is going through the large PABXs of the carrier’s enterprise customers will be managed by the IMS.
What happens if the carrier needs to bring 1,000 new enterprise customers online, or increase its FTTH customers by 1.5 million?
It has to talk to its vendor, increase specific hardware, create a new project, test it, deploy it and plan it – and this can take months. Using virtualized IMS using resources, the carrier may be able to do the same thing in days.
Rapid provisioning
There is another compelling example at the customer premise equipment (CPE) end of the market: the virtual set top box. Companies such as Deutsche Telekom and TeliaSonera are developing and trialling IPTV services that avoid the need for a dedicated set top box. The consumer functionality could be built into smart TVs, while the user interface and browser may be served from the cloud. With dedicated networks or prioritized bandwidth, latency isn’t an issue.
Beyond the immediate benefits, a virtualization-enabled network means that services can be provisioned for the customer almost instantly.
This is best illustrated by a story from my colleague Jim. He was telling me that his teenage son complains that Jim has the audacity to use his own Spotify account, which means his son can’t. Jim entertains him with accounts of when he was that age and had to get a bus to the nearest large city with a record store. What’s life going to be like in another generation?
The point being, like the virtual set top box idea, that the technology is equipped so we don’t have to wait for hardware to receive services.
Seamless portability
What about making your services seamlessly portable?
Telefonica is running a trial in Brazil that has taken the intelligence traditionally built into CPE such as domestic routers and moved it into the network. This simplifies the hardware in the customer premises, reduces the cost of delivering that hardware to the premises and reduces the number of engineer service visits. Good for the carrier, but also the customer. All the services are now defined in the network and if the customer moves location, they can get all of their services switched across in bulk.
What about making your bandwidth seamlessly portable?
Greater intelligence in the network could enable innovative services such as portable bandwidth and services. If you’re going on holiday, why do you have to pay for WiFi or pay TV again in a hotel when you’re not using them at home? That’s seamless mobility taken to a whole new level.
Disaster recovery
Even before challenges arose from technology trends such as cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) WAN connectivity was challenging for IT professionals. High-speed WAN links are expensive and difficult to manage. But it’s even more difficult to deliver highly reliable secure WAN links with low latency now that the IT team must manage applications and data that reside on a combination of public and private cloud data centres and are accessed remotely by a range of devices. Emerging SDN technologies enable WANs to address these challenges with automated network provisioning, links between data centers and secure remote access to files and applications.
One interesting SDN WAN application is the ability to offer continuous availability between remote data centres. Many IT managers would like to move to an active-active data centre model, where the network can synchronize compute and storage resources. The WAN is critical to ensure organisations can immediately move key applications to a geographically separate data centre in the event of a failure (e.g., natural disaster) at one data centre. In order for the IT team to achieve continuous availability with the active-active data centre model, the SDN WAN can provide predictable performance (latency), improved reliability, automated failover, performance monitoring and management, and application visibility.
Politics, law and outlook
A package of telecom-related measures that would enshrine the principles of net neutrality in law passed its first vote in the European Parliament in April 2014. A few months previously in the USA, a court decision seemed to swing the power toward those who favour what can be called tiered network access or network prioritization. This uncertainty doesn’t seem to be slowing the investment being made in SDN and NFV technologies, so the technology will exist whether the regulatory environment catches up or not.
Either way, it’s a hot debate and one that will likely continue for a long time.
The outlook for NFV is straightforward: it’s coming and it is carrier-driven. Just as your mobile phone carrier or your pay TV operator will make technology decisions, telecom service providers will begin to adopt an NFV strategy. A simplistic view is that IP services can be compared to a telephone dial tone. Provided it works as advertised and hits the right metrics, how it is delivered is irrelevant.
SDN, however, may have a rockier future. There are still too many emerging options for customers to jump in and take the plunge. On green field or opportunistic projects, SDN can be deployed, but in looking at an enterprise-wide standard there are far too many unknowns at this point and we still don’t know who the winners and losers will be. Much like standardizing on an operating system or a database, the decision to deploy SDN in a wide scale manner carries a significant amount of weight and should not be taken lightly.

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