The Top Five Reasons to Deploy
Software-Defined Networks and
Network Functions Virtualization
May 2014
Prepared by:
Zeus Kerravala
The Top Five Reasons to Deploy Software-Defined Networks
and Network Functions Virtualization
by Zeus Kerravala
May 2014
ZK Research
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A Division of Kerravala
Consulting
Introduction: Business Agility Depends on Network
Transformation
The mandate for technology leaders has changed more in the past five years
than perhaps any other position in the business world. Just a half decade ago, IT
leaders were tasked with ensuring the technology infrastructure was running
smoothly and could support the business. Today, IT executives from service
providers and enterprise organizations are discovering that their goals are now in
alignment with the goals of the business (Exhibit 1). Business agility is at the top
of every CEO’s priority list. To accomplish these goals, IT agility must become an
imperative as well.
Much of today’s IT environment—including compute, storage and application
infrastructure—already has become more agile. However, IT agility cannot be
realized fully until the network reaches the same level of agility. This is one
reason why many leading enterprises and service providers have begun to
deploy a network fabric. The fabric can make the network a flexible and scalable
resource.
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Exhibit 1: Line-of-Business and IT Leader Goals Are Tightly Aligned
Influence and insight
through social media
Source: ZK Research, 2014
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
The Top Five Reasons to Deploy Software-Defined Networks and Network Functions Virtualization
Technology executives should begin considering the
network fabric as a foundational component of
network agility and examine technologies that can
evolve networking to the next level, including
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network
Functions Virtualization (NFV).
Network fabrics provide significant benefits, such as
simplifying network deployments, lowering
management costs and increasing network
utilization. However, network fabrics are only part of
the solution for transforming the network because
they primarily address network transport. The next
step for enterprise IT leaders is to create flexible
network services such as bandwidth optimization,
network overlays and software-based routing.
Service providers should focus on enabling the rapid
creation of services such as VPN, firewall, NAT and
routing to protect customer data and add revenuegenerating services.
NFV can be leveraged to rapidly create or migrate
network services, while SDNs can be a
complementary technology that orchestrates
network policies, better secures the network, and
increases the integration between network and IT
infrastructure. Shifting to SDN and NFV and pairing
them with a network fabric will enable the most
significant network transformation ever.
Section II: Defining SDN and NFV
SDN and NFV are complementary technologies that
can be used in conjunction with a network fabric to
bring the same level of agility to the network as other
areas of IT. To understand how to best leverage the
technologies, it’s important to understand the
differences between them.
In SDN, the data-forwarding capabilities and the
control plane have been decoupled from one
another—enabling network management to be
centralized as opposed to the traditional box-by-box
management methods used today. Moreover,
management processes can be streamlined to
reduce human error, which is the largest cause of
network downtime (Exhibit 2). This approach
ultimately can improve user performance in
enterprises and help service providers avoid
customer churn.
Exhibit 2: Human Error Is the Largest Cause of Network Downtime
Source: ZK Research, 2014
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
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The Top Five Reasons to Deploy Software-Defined Networks and Network Functions Virtualization
Additionally, with the use of northbound APIs, SDN
enables applications and networks to become more
aware of and talk directly to each other. These
improved interactions can enable applications to
redefine network settings such as ACLs, QoS
settings and path optimization as required.
SDN also utilizes southbound APIs and
standardized protocols to act as a “network
middleware” layer that creates a single, common
control point for network infrastructure such as
routers, switches and application delivery controllers.
NFV provides the ability to run key network services
as pure software workloads. This means any
network service—such as routing, a VPN or a
firewall—can be decoupled from the physical
platform on which it typically resides. With NFV,
instead of sending IT staff to a physical location,
such as a branch office, to deploy a physical
appliance, the network service can be created on
demand—similar to the way virtual servers can be
created using virtualization technology. For service
providers, NFV can enable rapid creation to protect
or optimize customer networks.
Using NFV significantly increases the agility of these
functions because they can now be migrated from
location to location along with virtual compute
workloads or storage. This ensures that all the
network services associated with specific
applications will remain intact as IT departments
increase the mobility of virtual servers.
Managing physical infrastructure in remote locations
is an operationally intensive process. Therefore, any
business with multiple locations should use NFV in
branch offices by software-enabling routers. The
difficulty in managing branch technology on a
location-by-location basis is the primary reason why
it’s nearly impossible for companies with even a
moderate number of branch offices to maintain
consistent services in each location.
For service providers, the value of NFV is both the
security and the cost savings it provides. NFV
enables service providers to quickly create a secure,
virtual firewall that their customers can use to protect
cloud services from outside threats. This can be
done in a fraction of the time it would take to
provision a physical appliance, increasing both
agility and cost effectiveness. Organizations using
site-to-site VPN will also benefit because it creates
the ability to add more utility-based resources and
increase capacity outside the local data center.
The combination of SDN and NFV running on a
network fabric can improve network operations
across the entire corporate network, including the
branch, campus, data center and wireless networks.
Section III: The Top Five Reasons to
Adopt SDN and NFV
There are numerous reasons why companies should
utilize SDN and NFV in conjunction with a fabric
architecture. SDN and NFV improve the dynamism
of the network, create fluidity of network services
and improve network management. However, there
are five crucial reasons why service providers and
enterprises should make SDN and NFV an
imperative today:
1. Optimized user experience: The data center’s
evolution into a more agile environment is
important for businesses today. However, data
center transformation is largely undertaken to
improve IT processes. Using SDN and NFV
extends the value of network agility to the entire
network, and ultimately to the entire workforce.
SDN and NFV can deliver a consistent, reliable
and high-quality experience to all users, which
has a significant impact on worker productivity.
This is crucial for network managers; a 2014 ZK
Research study revealed that improving the user
experience is now the top management initiative
for network professionals (Exhibit 3). It can also
help service providers differentiate themselves
in a fast-growing competitive landscape.
2. Alignment of IT infrastructure with business
goals: Today’s business leaders are focused on
enabling higher levels of worker productivity and
improving business agility while lowering the
overall cost of running IT. Achieving this can be
a daunting task because the IT environment has
become increasingly complex. For decades, IT
leaders have had to make trade-offs and choose
products that either reduce costs or improve
productivity because products rarely accomplish
both. SDN and NFV can help create an
environment where IT leaders no longer have to
choose between IT projects that can either
control cost or boost worker productivity.
3. Automation of IT processes: ZK Research
reveals that the average lead time to deploy new
applications is four months—hardly the definition
of an agile business. This lag can cause service
providers to fall behind the competition, and
cause enterprises to miss out on new business
opportunities. The long deployment cycle is
attributed to the human latency caused by the
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
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The Top Five Reasons to Deploy Software-Defined Networks and Network Functions Virtualization
manual coordination among various IT silos. The
process of making changes to the infrastructure
can be equally long and business impairing
because the challenges related to process
coordination also exist with change
management. In contrast, using SDN and NFV
enables IT processes to be orchestrated and
streamlined or even fully automated based on
business policy. Now when applications require
changes to the server, storage and network
tiers, the changes can be made simultaneously
from a centralized management console.
4. Cost-effective, optimized application
performance: With legacy IT models, IT
executives often faced a difficult decision. One
choice was to overspend on the network,
provision it for peak utilization, and have it sit
nearly idle the majority of the time. The other
choice was to manage costs and provision the
network for normal usage, and risk poor
performance at peak times. The combination of
SDN and NFV now allows IT leaders to
provision the network at normal levels and then
dynamically add resources when required. This
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optimizes application performance because
applications will have the right level of network
resources during normal and peak usage
periods while reducing the size of the spare
hardware pool.
5. Reduced infrastructure costs and service
complexity: With traditional networks, each
location typically requires dedicated devices for
each network service, no matter how small the
location. This means each branch office would
have its own separate router, firewall, VPN
device and other devices to deliver all the
services required. This “service chaining” is
highly inefficient because each device must be
configured individually, which increases
management and troubleshooting complexity. In
contrast, NFV enables multiple servers to run on
a single hardware platform, reducing both
troubleshooting and provisioning times. Service
providers will increase the profitability of their
services by leveraging SDN and NFV to reduce
operational costs and hardware costs.
Exhibit 3: Improving User Experience Is Top of Mind for Network Managers
Source: ZK Research, 2014
© 2014 ZK Research
Influence and insight through social media
The Top Five Reasons to Deploy Software-Defined Networks and Network Functions Virtualization
Service providers and businesses should consider
not only the immediate benefits for the network, but
also the long-term role that the network will play in
the era of cloud computing. Combining SDN and
NFV with an underlying network fabric architecture
provides an excellent foundation for IT to leverage
the cloud in order to shift to an “as-a-service” model.
 Shift the network to a fabric architecture.
Implementing an underlying network fabric is the
first step toward improving network agility. IT
leaders should deploy SDN and NFV in
conjunction with a network fabric. This enables
greater flexibility in network transport and the
services that run on the network.
Section IV: Conclusion and
Recommendations
Business agility is now an imperative for service
providers and enterprises because the ability to roll
out new services quickly is a key competitive
differentiator. Virtualization has had a significant
impact on the computing industry, but the network
has lagged behind. Businesses can only be as agile
as their least agile IT component. Therefore,
technology professionals must now look to NFV and
SDN to increase network agility and bring the
network into alignment with the rest of IT.
The network is the only pervasive resource, and it
connects all IT resources to users and devices no
matter where they are. However, to continue
providing effective support, the network must evolve.
For organizations looking to capitalize on a network
that is more flexible and cost effective, SDN and
NFV will position the network to become the key
point of competitive differentiation. This introduces
new criteria for selecting network architectures and
solution providers. IT decision-makers must shed
legacy thinking and move the decision criteria away
from aspects such as market share and incumbency,
and focus instead on attributes such as how resilient
the network is, to what degree the network simplifies
the infrastructure, and how the user experience is
improved. With this in mind, ZK Research makes the
following recommendations for companies looking to
implement SDN and NFV:
 Simplify the network architecture. Enterprises
and service providers should migrate away from
a predominantly inflexible, hardware-based
architecture to one that leverages the flexibility of
software. This, in turn, reduces complexity and
creates a network that is easier to manage
through the use of automation and orchestration
tools.
 Choose solutions that are standards-based
and open. Implementing SDN and NFV requires
a large ecosystem of solution providers. A
network built on closed, proprietary technologies
may not be able to interoperate with all the
necessary ecosystem vendors. A standardsbased, open solution guarantees the broadest
range of choice for customers.
© 2014 ZK Research: A Division of Kerravala Consulting
All rights reserved. Reproduction or redistribution in any form without the express prior permission of ZK Research is expressly prohibited.
For questions, comments or further information, e-mail [email protected].
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