Networking

Cloud Networking

The advent of Cloud Computing changes the approach to data center networks in terms of throughput, resilience, and management. Cloud computing is a compelling way for many businesses, small (private) and large (public) to take advantage of web based applications. One can deploy applications more rapidly across shared server and storage resource pools than is possible with conventional enterprise solutions. Deploying modern web applications across a cloud infrastructure enables a new level of agility that is very difficult to accomplish with traditional silo computing model.

Some of the Key Considerations

Scalability

The cloud network must scale to the overall level of throughput required to ensure that it does not become the bottleneck. This means the cloud networking fabric must handle throughouts that will reach trillions of packets per second in the near future.

Low Latency

The cloud network must deliver microsecond latency across the entire network fabric since low latency improves application performance and server utilization.

Guaranteed Performance

The cloud network must provide predictable performance to service a large number of simultaneous applications in the network, including video, voice and web traffic.

Self-Healing Resilience

Cloud networks operate 24x7, so downtime is not an option. This requires a network architecture that offers self-healing and the ability for transparent inservice software updates.

Extensible Management

Real-time upgrades and image/patch management in a large cloud network is a daunting challenge to network administrators. A vastly simpler approach is required to handle networks of this size, which automates provisioning, monitoring, maintenance, upgrading, and troubleshooting.

Advanced SD-WAN

Smart, Secure Routing That Does Exactly What Your Business Needs. The SD-Wan Platform takes distributed, software-defined routing to an entirely new level. This innovative networking solution enables enterprises and service providers to build service-centric fabrics that deliver breakthroughs in simplicity, security, performance, and savings. And most importantly, it creates a networking environment that delivers the agility businesses need to move with their customers and outpace their competitors.

Product Components

The platform is comprised of two primary components: the Smart Router and the Conductor. Together, they form a single logical control plane that is highly distributed, and a data plane that is truly session-aware. It supports a wide range of deployment models scaling from a small branch office to a high capacity edge router to a hyper-scale software-defined data center. Smart Router combines a service-centric, control plane and a session aware data plane to offer IP routing, feature-rich policy management, improved visibility and proactive analytics. Conductor is a centralized management and policy engine that provides orchestration, administration, zero-touch provisioning, monitoring, and analytics for distributed Smart Routers – while maintaining a network-wide, multi-tenant service, and policy data model.

Application Delivery Services

Over the last two decades or so three main trends have changed the way applications are put together and delivered to consumers.

First, the popularity of the web browser and high speed internet as a delivery mechanism led to clients using of applications via web browsers and eventually through apps on mobile devices, while moving away from a desktop model.

This naturally led to a SaaS-based business and operational model providing immense economies of scale. Rapid changes to software became a strategy to maintain competitive edge, which gave rise to the need for continuous integration and continuous deployment.

Second, virtualization, cloud and software-defined infrastructure brought deploying and putting together complex webscale systems into the realm of software programming and thereby brought in a series of tools and methodologies that make it simple to rapidly create such application infrastructures. This has given birth to the DevOps culture, a cross between operations and software development, empowering departments and individual app owners to control the specific services they need from the infrastructure without having to wait for an IT approval cycle.

A third, and the most consequential trend, facilitated by automating many of the time consuming chores of deploying and interconnecting server clusters efficiently, led to a move away from a large, “hard to debug and maintain” monolithic mainframe like application architectures into larger numbers of more manageable, easy to debug, distributed microservices.