Corporate Dossier 2013: Networking Services

A Corporate Dossier of Hot Technologies: 

 SDN Makes Networks Virtual

Technology is changing the face of business more quickly with each passing day. Business and technology decision makers are challenged to balance IT resources, business requirements, and user desires.

The network industry is matured and organizations are taking to architectural benefit related to outcome based modeling. Today's network services should be capable of handling triple play services like voice, video and data. Network has to be architected to accommodate future technology disruptions and provide investment protection. It should also be able to roll out the expected services as quickly as possible to meet the business demands.

Network services are the day-to-day tasks required to keep network infrastructure up to date and operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Working with ISP to ensure there is always an Internet connection, keeping the network free of viruses, making sure the data is secure and backed up on a daily basis, and allowing people to work remotely are all examples of network services. Core network services, which also include name resolution (DNS), IP address assignment (DHCP) and management (IPAM), RADIUS for authentication and authorization, NTP and File distribution systems are used by just about every networked application, which these days includes pretty much every non-trivial application.

 

CURRENT TRENDS
Together these network services represents the ‘GLUE' that connects users, network and applications. These services play a major role in deciding the application experience to end users like latency and outages etc.
The network services have traditionally been deployed as standalone, stovepipe applications. While with rapid changes in the way organizations are evolving it demands tight integration between platform and applications with ease of operations.

Organizations are looking for integrated DHCP, DNS and RADIUS so that post authentication new IP addressed assigned by DHCP server are updated in DNS. Integrated audit is also important to keep trail of newly given IP address from regulatory compliance perspective and organizations are now looking towards purpose build solutions.

According to Bhavin Barbhaya, VP, sales, network infrastructure, AGC Networks, "Core network services are positioned as foundation of network access. It is difficult to manage multiple equipment with general purpose hardware and general purpose operating system providing network services. Troubleshooting these multiple devices through logs is a nightmare and adds operational cost to organization. Due to such reasons, the purpose build network services appliances are in demand today."

There has been sizeable growth in the Indian market for such appliances and day by day organizations are seeing value in such appliances. The traditional deployment of such services and migrating to appliance is not an easy task, which requires careful planning for capacity, continuity and availability. The awareness about such appliances and operational ease will drive the growth in coming time for special purpose build network services appliances.

In the view of Zafar Saeed, VP, products and service delivery, Albion InfoTel, "With rapid growth of cloud based solutions we don't see much of increasing demand in device based network services. However vendors are coming up with innovative ideas to grab the opportunities it at higher level eg cloud. For example a virtual hosted server now usually comes freely offered IPS/IDS and routing."

Subhashini Ramakrishnan, chief technology manager, Dax Networks says, "The market is clearly and distinctly evolving towards intelligent hardware devices which are software rich. Now networking is a real productivity tool for the end users. Over a few quarters the SME segment is showing distinct interest in services enablement, especially managed IP surveillance solution."

DEMAND
India is witnessing fast pace growth in technology like 3G/4G rollout, Cloud services , WLAN adoption and BYOD. As business demands access of information from anywhere, anytime and always available, demand for network services appliances will be growing. Such appliances simplify the integration of various core services, enhances ease of deployment and reduces operational complexity which are key drivers for adoption.

For AGC Networks, technologies which are being tailor-made makes adoption more possible. Barbhaya said, "We have wireless campuses becoming a basic need for professional institutes. We have very distinctive needs from hospitality sector to make their guest stay pleasantly. They need their network to be accessible by any devise from anywhere in the campus. Finally we have government which on one hand has many of its department going the e-way and thus demanding network solutions. On other hand they are connecting citizens with rest of the world by internet and thus demanding network presence and expansion." AGC Networks has networking solutions as one of its core competencies. It serves verticals like BFSI, manufacturing, healthcare, government/public sector units, IT and ITeS.

"The market size for Network Managed services in our estimation should grow double over the next two years especially with optimization, acceleration, application visibility, control and reporting. Dax is building smart tools for our products to be software rich," informed Ramakrishnan. Dax is leading towards a dominant market share in strategic projects which are multi-site large enterprise and government networks, especially in IP surveillance systems and managed networking solutions.

THE ROAD AHEAD
Software defined networking or SDN is bringing in a lot of flexibility, enablement and cost advantages for enterprises. With virtualization and network remote management SDN brings in a lot of value. While network experts are still contemplating between options like symmetric v/s asymmetric, host- based v/s network- centric, etc, IT vendors expect it to be the next ‘cloud' of networking.

Soon, network-on-cloud as an option is emerging. Technology experts are looking beyond storage, information and platforms as a cloud based model and considering including network and network security also over cloud.
Saeed feels today organizations want a network that listens, responds, and adapts. Today, trends such as cloud, video, bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and big data are poised to help customers increase employee productivity and take better care of their customers. Once again, the network is playing a central role.

E R Ashok Kumar, VP, services, Cisco India and Saarc informs, "We have Open Network Environment (Cisco ONE), which is a portfolio of Cisco technologies and open standards that brings programmatic control and application awareness to the network, combining the benefits of hardware and software across physical and virtual. You need your network and your applications to work together - and that's exactly what the Open Network Environment does for you."

IDC predicts that by 2016, the SDN market will be worth $2 bn a year, up from just $168 mn today. With the promise of SDN architectures radically decreasing total cost of ownership (TCO), and vendor innovation/support continuing to increase.

The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting SDN, continues to accelerate the standards, deployment and advanced use of SDN.

SDN Makes Networks Virtual (Domain specialist Sps)

Sai Infosystem
Domain expertise
There is a rat race to keep pace with the changing world and fighting the internal inertia

Xpress Computers
Core expertise in networking, huge base of SMB
customers
Limited brands on offer

Radiant Info Solution
Capability to offer system integration and product distribution
Lack of direct offices in pan-India

Leading Edge Communication
Dealing in pure play SI segment
Customer management and understanding the flip-flops of the project

Spark Technologies
Robust financial management to handle government projects
Managing both distribution business and government projects in parallel

 

Sandhya Malhotra
(sandhyam@cybermedia.co.in)