Driven by the rise of cloud architectures and the need to build scalable applications that can effectively manage torrential data, today’s businesses are actively seeking a more dynamic, responsive, and robust IT infrastructure that enables them to meet their operational needs and respond to the ever-evolving demands of the consumer-driven market. It’s no wonder why many businesses have rapidly been adopting network virtualization.
Network virtualization (NV) signifies a new IT paradigm, helping organizations to improve their application performance and achieve greater business efficiency by maximizing network asset utilization and enhancing security while cutting operational costs.
SourceForge recently caught up with Hussein Khazaal, the VP of Marketing and Partnerships at Nuage Networks, to talk about the role of network virtualization in cloud computing and how businesses can leverage NV to enjoy cost-saving, efficiency, agility, and security benefits. Khazaal also shared with us how the Nuage Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) helps organizations optimize their virtual network performance and address the challenges of multi-tenant data centers while reducing costs.
Q: Please share with us a brief overview of your company (year founded, size, solutions, etc.)?
Hussein Khazaal, the VP of Marketing and Partnerships at Nuage Networks
A: Nu-âhj: From French, meaning ‘cloud’. Founded in 2012, Nuage Networks from Nokia brings a combination of technologies and networking expertise to the enterprise and telecommunications industries. Our mission was to apply new thinking to the problem of delivering massively scalable and highly programmable SDN solutions within and across the datacenter and out to the wide area network (SD-WAN) with the security and availability required by business-critical environments. We have the pedigree to serve the needs of the world’s biggest clouds. The cloud has made promises – the mission of Nuage Networks is to help you realize them using the Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP).
Q: Virtualization is increasingly becoming an essential part of an organization’s IT system as it helps manage, control, and secure network infrastructure. For certain readers who may be unfamiliar with the term, can you please explain the concept of virtualization as well as its importance to today’s modern organizations in the simplest terms?
A: Virtualization has transformed the IT industry as a whole, bringing with it agility, significant cost savings, reduction in physical servers, increased uptime and availability to name a few. Server virtualization has decoupled the workload from the physical hardware it ran on, significantly improving physical asset utilization. It also enabled the workload to run anywhere inside the datacenter and even the public cloud. However, network and security provisioning were holding that digital transformation back because of their manual nature, until software-defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization came along, which enabled the full automation of connecting and securing that workload. This combination of server and network virtualization has enabled IT teams to not only be more efficient and more agile, but it accelerated innovation in the enterprise as Application Developers have better and faster access to all these virtualized resources on demand as needed. It simplified and accelerated the consumption of infrastructure resources in ways that were never possible before.
Q: How does virtualization help improve efficiency in a client-server model?
A: The decoupling of the workload from the physical server enables the use of a single physical server to host multiple workloads at the same time, which is a more efficient use of that server’s resources. Furthermore, because of the speed with which workloads can be deployed, migrated, scaled-up and decommissioned, IT organizations now have an elastic capacity that can be used on-demand by the end-users. This increases the IT organization’s efficiency and helps them focus on high-value activity as opposed the manual provisioning of systems and reacting to business application demands. They can also better equipped to deal with network failures with this high-level of automation.
Q: What are the most common virtual network performance issues and/or challenges? And how does Nuage Networks solve them?
A: The biggest challenge is traffic throughput and latency. How do you make sure that you efficiently use the available capacity and provide maximum throughput for user traffic without impacting latency (the latter is more relevant for Telco Cloud applications). Many virtualized networking solutions run on the same server, using commodity hardware, so performance is a key area of concern. The Nuage Networks VSP solution, despite using community-based OVS (Open Virtual Switch), has been optimized to deliver maximum throughput without consuming too many valuable resources that are required for use by the workloads themselves. For specific Network Function Virtualizations, we have integrations with leading NIC vendors such as Mellanox and Intel to provide even more optimal performance.
Q: As the leader in network virtualization and software-defined networking (SDN), how do you optimize virtual network performance?
A: In addition to the data-path optimization that we offer, we leverage performance-related enhancements that include the use of DPDK, SR-IOV, OVS-Offload, and VxLAN-Offload to enhance the network performance of the workloads that are connected using our overlay. Furthermore, we have QoS (Quality of Service) capabilities that can be used to classify & prioritize traffic, including traffic shaping. These features help manage traffic and ensure optimal network performance beyond throughput. Finally, we have extensive network monitoring and analytics capabilities that proactively alerts the user to take corrective action and anticipate network quality degradation.
Q: Could you offer some helpful advice on how to get started on a virtualization pilot?
A: It is important to take inventory of current needs as well as future plans from an IT perspective. For example, understanding what Cloud Management System (CMS) and Hypervisor type (VMware ESXi, KVM or Hyper-V) are best suited for your business applications is key. You must also evaluate the workload types (VM, Baremetal or Container) and the location where these workloads (DC, Multiple DCs, Public Cloud or mix) will run. Once the IT team have mapped out these requirements, you must set up a representative PoC that includes all of these variables to choose the best SDN solution for your needs today and into the future. Based on our deployments in many large enterprises and large SP customers, the 4 key requirements are:
- Hybrid workload & hypervisor support (Containers, VMs & Baremetal Servers) as well as support for all Hypervisor types;
- Multi-DC support as well as support for remote sites, public clouds and SaaS;
- Open, Restful API support that drives the entire platform and support for 3rd party solutions to easily integrate; and
- Built-in security capabilities that include application visibility & analytics, granular protection techniques such as micro-segmentation, and pre-programmed remedial capabilities.
For service providers, being able to support multi-tenancy and offer a wide range of services is key, as they are trying to consolidate their assets and offer as many services as possible. Furthermore, they need to ensure maximum security to not only protect their network, but also protect their users’ traffic.
Q: What makes Nuage Networks unique? In what ways can you help service providers and their customers deliver on the true promise of the cloud?
A: Service providers (SPs) have a variety of requirements and, in many cases, they must deploy different solutions to fulfill these requirements. They are also looking for ways to improve profitability and grow revenues through the ability to offer new services. What Nuage Networks uniquely offers, is the one platform that delivers all of that and more.
The Nuage Networks VSP is a multi-tenant platform that has been designed for scale with a robust networking core that combines agility, resiliency, high-performance, and security to offer service providers a highly automated network and security platform, thus producing significant operational savings. Many of our customers report 45-60% OPEX savings because of the automation, which enables them to offer a better service to their customers, more optimal utilization of their human resources, allowing them to focus on high-value activity. VSP is also the only software-based solution that delivers all three different hypervisor types with full functionality, and supports all possible workloads on these hypervisors to further enhance the SPs ability to offer a wide range of services with a single platform.
Additionally, the same platform extends to include visibility and control across the wide area network (WAN) as well as public cloud, adding more ways to generate new revenues streams for the service provider using the same platform. SD-WAN is a new area of interest to many service providers and the Nuage Networks VSP is the only platform that combines network virtualization in the DC and WAN. Plus, it allows SPs to offer their enterprise customers not only VPN connectivity but creative new services that include value-added services, secure connectivity to the cloud, as well as managed cloud service.
SPs now have the unique ability to use a single platform to both reduce their OPEX and grow their revenues from new services.
Q: Tell us a bit more about Nuage Virtualized Services Platform (VSP). How can this solution enable virtualization of any data center network infrastructure?
A: The Nuage Networks VSP was designed to solve network automation problems at scale and without compromise. We never looked at it in for a particular stack or a single location, because the problem we wanted to solve was to connect users to applications, and we saw that users are more mobile and applications have evolved in their types and where they are hosted. It is clear today that requirements have evolved, and many of our competitors are looking at combining multiple solutions or acquiring companies to fill gaps in their portfolio to meet the demands of their customers.
Fortunately, we had built our solution from the ground up anticipating that workloads will change, security will be part of networking and public cloud, and SaaS & WAN serve as parts of that network fabric. Because of that, the Nuage Networks VSP’s architecture of a clustered management platform, with a scalable control plane that supports many standard routing protocols at scale, and a flexible data-plane help us address the challenges of network virtualization today and into the future. Most importantly, we built the platform to be fully programmable and driven by a Restful API and run on any underlay (any switch, any router, any server and any hypervisor). Our unrestricted approach to network virtualization will fit any deployment and scenario so that you can take advantages of all these benefits
Q: What rising key trends, technologies, or methods do you think will affect the future of software-defined networking (SDN)?
The three main trends are SD-WAN, Security. and Telco Cloud. SD-WAN presents a huge opportunity for us and our customers, and we will see this market grow and develop and we expect to lead with our platform. Our VSP is also our SD-WAN 2.0 platform and represents a single networking platform that is built to help deliver IT services over IP is unique and fits the needs of both enterprises as well managed service providers.
Software-defined security will continue to evolve and we expect to also enhance our platform to deliver key features and capabilities to help our customers not only enhance the security of their networks, but for our SP customers to be able to offer new security services to their enterprise customers.
Finally, we believe that SDN is a key enabler for NFV adoption and enablement, and we expect to be a key player in that space.
Q: What does the future hold for Nuage Networks? Are there any updates and/or product offerings and integrations that customers should look forward to?
A: We continue to add more SP customers to our roster of the world’s largest SPs such as BT, Telefonica, NTT com, Telia, Telus, Exponential-e, China Mobile, China Telecom etc. Some selecting our platform to offer public cloud services and others have selected our platform to provide managed SD-WAN services to their enterprise customers.
Our list of capabilities and unique features continues to grow with every release and the latest release includes a feature that covers performance, value-added services, and most importantly security. For example, most recently, we have enhanced our Virtualized Security Services (VSS) capabilities to include enhance visibility and encryption with support for public cloud.
Nuage Networks’ ecosystem of technology partners continue to grow to offer our customers joint solutions that help them build best of breed networks. Most recently, we have added Ipanema, a WAN Optimization solution from InfoVista, to our list of supported VNFs on our SD-WAN uCPE. For DC use-cases, we have completed our integration with Avi Networks, adding them to the list of ADC partners we already have such as F5, Citrix, and A10.
Customers should expect more security features and SD-Branch capabilities as well as enhancements to our networking capabilities in support of TelcoCloud and public cloud.
About Nuage Networks
Nuage Networks from Nokia brings a unique combination of cutting-edge cloud technologies and unrivaled networking expertise. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Nuage Networks empowers today’s cloud service providers and modern enterprises to seamlessly manage large, multi-tenant clouds by providing robust and scalable software-defined networking (SDN) solutions. Aside from SDN, Nuage Networks specializes in network choreography, network virtualization, cloud computing, and software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN).