I’ve been looking at the impact of the cloud, SDN, NFV and all of the rest of the growing list of acronyms. My focus has been on the network equipment side, and the vendors who supply it, but there’s another piece of the puzzle, the IT side. Whatever functionality leaves purpose-built network devices arrives somewhere else, unless we think networks will get less functional over time.
What’s happening to the IT guys? One interesting data point is IBM’s decision to rebrand the “IBM Services Delivery Manager” as the “SmartCloud Orchestrator”, and it may be that Orchestrator is the ball-carrier for IBM’s vision of a cloud-driven network.
Orchestrator is a system package that is designed to create a total framework for cloud deployment and not just an overlay to support provisioning. The unique perspective of Orchestrator is that it’s a cloud’s-eye view of applications, meaning that it’s designed to make application developers and IT professionals think of application deployments in the cloud as a holistic process, almost treating the cloud as a virtual computer. That’s a very critical step because once you view the cloud as a virtual machine, you can start programming for it, which is exactly what IBM plans to do according to operators who have heard the pitch.
Everything we talk about in terms of modern application network evolution can be framed as the result of a DevOps or Quantum process. We know that because it is already being done; Quantum’s evolution has been in no small part an expansion of the network models or templates that it recognizes. But suppose that DevOps or Quantum (or, dare we say, Orchestrator) could also frame network functionality—help to host and connect virtual functions and centralized control planes? I’ve pointed out for a couple of blogs that we need to be thinking about how you develop all this stuff we’re ceding magically to the cloud. Why not develop it as a cloud application?
Probably the best place to test the efficacy of this notion is in the mobile space. If you look at modern mobile/4G-LTE deployment you see that Systems Architecture Evolution (SAE) broadly defines a mobile world that exists at three levels. There’s a service plane that’s made up of IMS elements, there’s a signaling plane (eNodeB and MME), and there’s the Evolved Packet Core with the SGW and PGW. All of IMS is arguably a hosted process, and so is all of the signaling handling. What’s left is the EPC and the notion of mobility management of the data plane. I don’t think there are many who believe that SDN or NFV processes would divert the data plane into servers (it doesn’t scale in performance or cost), but if you were to combine SDN central control with the hosted elements of IMS and MME, add in the control pieces of the SGW and PGW, and link the result via OpenFlow to simple switches, you could create a mobile-metro model that was totally revolutionary.
Forget protests that you can’t virtualize all of mobile infrastructure; you can virtualize everything but the data plane and that’s all anyone could expect. Given that the data-plane pieces of this puzzle are those simple switches that could reasonably be stamped out by pretty much any competent manufacturer if somebody like IBM offered a spec, we can see that a player like IBM could come to own this process.
The challenge for IBM is the partnership challenge. IBM has been trying to be the foundation player, relying on partners to offer the service- or application-specific parts of the puzzle. That’s fine for applications intended for enterprises, but it has a fatal flaw when targeting the evolution of operator networks. The players with assets in the service layer (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson) aren’t likely to cede the market to IBM.
HP and Oracle probably hold the key here and not IBM, despite the fact that IBM is taking a giant step with Orchestrator. HP has specific network assets, and so does Oracle (different ones, to be sure). HP has as good a cloud incumbency as IBM and Oracle has a better network-software incumbency. Could HP or Oracle define a virtual-machine cloud model like Orchestrator but make it immediately relevant to the service provider space by including mobile service features? Sure they could; we just don’t know if they will.
And we should care a lot, particularly if we want to predict the future of SDN. I’ve gotten most of the way through my model of SDN impact, and the inescapable conclusion even at this early point is that no vendor can succeed in the SDN space without selling mostly to network operators in the next three years. Also, nobody can win with network operators without winning in metro-cloud. For all the IT vendors, the mission I’ve described here is the formula for relevance. For network equipment vendors, the mission I’ve described is potentially their Achilles’ Heel; if they lose this then they lose control of both SDN and NFV, and likely forever.