NetEvents Garmisch 2012 blog - part one

Dan Pitt, Open Network Foundation: A Revolution in Networking is on the Horizon

NetEvents, held in Garmisch at the Sonnenbichl Hotel and overlooked by the Zugspitz, Germany's highest mountain, opened with a keynote presentation on software-defined networking from Dan Pitt, Executive Director and sole full-time employee of the Open Network Foundation (ONF).

Networking equipment has always combined the control and data planes, said Pitt, but now they could be separated. The ONF supports software-defined networking (SDF), via the Open Flow protocol, which allows packet control in switches and routers to be separated from the mechanism that actually directs packets.

The advantages, according to Pitt, are that you would need only one operating system instance running on any single network and it would perform all the control functions that are currently performed by multiple instances, one in every switch. This lightens the processing load, it gives control to the centre, and it allows third parties to write applications for that device. These network apps might be specific to each business application, which would bind the network to business goals tighter than ever before. Switches and routers, Pitt said, then become simple packet forwarding devices.

"Telcos have been doing this for 100 years but it's new to data networking," Pitt said. "Instead of OSPF in every device, you put it in the central OS."

Member companies that have signed up for SDN and who are on the board of directors include large end users such as Google, Yahoo, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom and NTT.

"No vendors are allowed on the board," Pitt said. "Only the board can found a working group, approve standards and appoint chairs of working groups. Vendors can be on the groups but not chair them. So users are in the driving seat."

Other member companies include chip and switch vendors, including Cisco, and others including Citrix, Dell, VMware and Infoblox.

"In future, networking will become just an integral part of computing, using same tools as the rest of computing," Pitt said. "Enterprises will get out of managing plumbing, operators will become software companies, IT will add more business value, and there will be more network startups from Generation Y."

Before taking his place on the panel for the next session, Pitt was asked what impact this architectural shift would have on network performance. He said that a 30,000-user campus could be supported by a four-year-old Dell PC.

Ian Keene, VP, Gartner: Software Defined networking - is it really the future?

The next session picked up where Pitt had left off and discussed the chances of software-defined networking's success. Keene prefaced the panel discussion by asking: "In 2010, the top three network equipment vendors owned 82% of the $6bn market - what will they do? What about carrier networks, a $13bn market with top four vendors having 85% of market value. Will SDN rule?"

All the panel members, from Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), SDN board member Deutsche Telekom, Alcatel Lucent, Accedian, Enterasys, and the ONF's Dan Pitt, agreed that SDN was the future.

Asked about compliance, Pitt said the ONF was developing conformance programmes and procedures. "The spec needs to be extended to circuit switching, not just packet switching to as this will allow all switching to be identical. It also needs to work with existing infrastructure," he said.

Challenges were addressed next. "SDN still needs more work, including carrier grade resilience, interoperability with existing systems, and MPLS interoperability," Peter Feil, research director at Deutsche Telekom said. "It needs more than just a four-year-old Dell."

Marc Lassere said that lots remained to be done: "How do controllers talk to each other, and what about redundancy?" Feil disagreed: "SDN is already in use - look at the board members who are already using it."

Discussing the architectural changes, Markus Nispel, technology strategist at Enterasys, said: "You need to check the use cases that will affect the upper layers, and I agree you need a distributed control plane for complex secured networks. But hybrid systems will be around for a while."

Asked about performance, Lassere said: "Packets will still run at wire speed but this is not the main problem. You will need APIs that allow apps and the network to talk to each other and right now they don't." Feil said that the community would build apps using the open source model.

As for SDN's chances, Volker Distelrath, research head at NSN said: "It's open, that's the crucial thing and the main players have bought in and are working on it." Craig Easley, marketing VP at Accedian said: "End users are working on it too and that's a big point in its favour."

Day two of NetEvents October 2011 press summit in Frascati opened with a set of meetings between vendors and press (more info in next blog), followed

KEYNOTE: Joe Baguley, Chief Cloud Technologist, VMware.

The morning's keynote was delivered by Joe Baguley, chief cloud technologist from virtualisation software company VMware. Baguley talked about how virtualisation in the cloud will change how everyone works.

One of his main points was that in future the desktop operating system will be pulled apart as its various elements -- memory, disk and CPU -- are pushed into the cloud, and applications will be available anywhere on any device. This will remove the need for desktops, he said.

He also said we would also be seeing mobile virtual phones -- Android phones running another phone image -- very soon. Some corporates already do this with laptops so that one image is locked down and secured, designed for company usage, while the other is for personal use.

He was lightly grilled by the event host, Manek Dubash, who asked about the confusion that remains between cloud and virtualisation, the problems of over-reliance on unreliable networks, and Microsoft, VMware's biggest competitor.

HEAD 2 HEAD ‘Clash of the Titans' : Datacentre Architecture Shoot-Out

An entertaining session headed by Daniel Beazer, senior research analyst at Tier1 Research. Beazer played the role of an Australian media baron looking for pitches from cloud service providers, in the shape of Verizon Business's David Howarth and Brocade's John McHugh.

Howarth's pitch offered access anywhere, any time, any place, and to overcome the barriers of change, governance and trust. McHugh offered a flat, low-latency network which he said would allow capacity-based scaling. After a show of hands from the audience as to the more effective pitch (which McHugh narrowly won), two analysts played the role of consultants examining the two vendors' offerings. Keith Humphries (Eurolan) asked about legacy integration, while Rob Bamforth (QuoCirca) asked how the vendors planned to quantify existing assets.

After John McHugh declared systems integrators were going to be the road kill of the cloud, a final vote was taken, in which McHugh increased his margin of victory.

DEVIL’S ADVOCATE “Into the ether then into the cloud – the vital role of Ethernet”

Analyst James Eibisch from IDC was up next, and discussed the role of Ethernet in the cloud. For him, the question was whether high speed Ethernet can deliver at the core, and what benefit it brings to the cloud.

On the panel, Kevin Vachon of the MEF said that Ethernet will be critical to the cloud, while James Walker of Tata Communications said that cloud services are being taken up quickly as providers deploy Ethernet within and between their datacentres. McHugh said that Ethernet is great where appropriate, enlarged upon by Alcatel-Lucent's Phil Tilley who reckoned that Ethernet gives high bandwidth, secure and reliable services. Tilley added that Ethernet is ideal for known – i.e. not mobile -- locations. John McHugh added that it's not as simple as that as you can't just let people create and run their own Ethernet. It needs a multi-protocol architecture, he said.

After further discussion, Eibisch polled the audience, who agreed that Ethernet will be essential to cloud where its application makes sense.

Service Assurance with the Cloud. Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Communication, Collaboration and Convergence, Quocirca

The summit's penultimate session was led by Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at QuoCirca, and concerned service assurance in the cloud. He asked the panel how much was needed.

Panel member Marco Wanders from Acision said that the cloud needed application performance, availability and security, with cloud access being the key reason for the network's existence. Available capacity will always be used, he said, so you need to classify traffic to allow SLA and prioritisation to work.

Vodafone's Tim Gigg said his company has a cloud offering for multinationals but that latency is an issue when selling to Asia-Pac and Africa. He agreed that quality of service is important, so Vodafone places content caches close to its base stations.

David Howarth, of Verizon Business, said you need to define the experience you want to have and work backwards from there. We will backhaul traffic to the best place to get it to the Internet but we need application developers to collaborate, he said.

Ahmedou Oul Ahmed Sidi, from Mauritel, said his company was still thinking about cloud. His concerns were how cloud technology will affect the operator value chain and the telco business model. He was also concerned about security, service creation, the cost of migration from legacy infrastructures, and whether quality of service in the cloud was good enough for financial transactions. We wait to be convinced, he said.

Improving Profitability & ROI for SPs. Michal Halama, Principal Analyst, Business Network IT Services, Current Analysis

The final panel of the day came courtesy of Michal Halama, principal analyst at Current Analysis. Entitled Show Me The Money, this session concerned service providers' business models. The key factors for service providers are timing, revenue, cost-saving, and investment, he said. They need to blend existing services with new cloud services, and customers need to perceive the value.

From the panel, Alessandro Canzian, of BT, said that the cloud is a hub containing services from a number of players. Developers need to be creative in finding new services and not worrying about servers, while systems integrators need to integrate the legacy and cloud worlds.

Matthias Nass, from telecoms equipment vendor ECI, said that broadband is commodity, price-driven, with lots of user churn. This means there is a need to enhance revenue streams with services such as security, managed bandwidth, and datacentre strategies, Nass said. He said that a successful cloud needs to be easy to use, offer comprehensive functionality, automatic service provision, and integration of relevant services. He was favour of net neutrality but said that it was an international regulatory issue.

Panel member Simone Bonnannini, from Interoute, said that the service provider's role is not just to sell the bricks of the cloud but houses – i.e. not just services but the cloud itself. He saw the cloud as a black box to solve customers' problems and that's the key to making money. The problem with getting money from over-the-top operators, he said, is that if there are multiple operators, one will offer free transport and the rest must follow.

Jim Machi of Dialogic said that the cloud is a sandbox to allow developers to build applications. The first applications are non-essential, such as fax services, he said, followed by unified communications and new mobile services such as video messaging/SMS, and mobile videoconferencing.

After further discussion, the panel concluded. This wrapped up the summit for members of the press, although service providers and analysts stayed on for further discussions.

NetEvents EMEA Press Summit in Frascati opened on 5 October, keynote speaker James Walker of Tata Communications

NetEvents' press summit in Frascati opened on 5 October 2011 as the company's first event on the Italian mainland since 1999.

First on the cloud-focused agenda was keynote speaker James Walker of Tata Communications who spoke about the cloud behind the cloud -- or how cloud buyers need to consider the impact of the network and other services. During his keynote, Walker said that the cloud is complex and difficult to configure, as a result of which some customers are sticking with their old ATM point to point network because it works.

He was joined onstage by NetEvents editorial director Manek Dubash who asked him how cloud buyers could trust service providers who are reselling services from multiple partners, and how well providers can be trusted, given the uncertainty that exists over the size of the market.

This session was followed by Gartner VP Ian Keene, who introduced a plenary session on cloud infrastructure, security, transport and content delivery. Keene explained how the cloud had now passed Gartner's peak of inflated expectations and was heading for the trough of disillusionment, as negative press and disillusionment starts to appear. Keene said it means there are some questions to be asked/answered.

From the discussion panel, Steve Garrison from Infoblox talked about his company's VMware plugin with the aim of reducing the time to obtain an IP address. He said that the problem with optimising cloud is that it's about people, pipes, politics, and process, so savings come from automation.

Jeff Monroe of Verne Global said that his company had just built a datacentre in Iceland which offers free cooling without chillers. The problem is that people are putting servers in sub-optimal locations, such as city centres, he said.

Mattias Nass from ECI Telecom said that the big problem for cloud is the access networks which are giving users bandwidth problems. The challenges are who will pay for cloud services, opex and regulatory concerns. He pointed out that bandwidth is limited even in developed countries. The cost savings from the cloud mean no additional specialisation or spending on IT, especially in SMBs, he said.

Sean Larner of wireless company Xirrus was next onstage being interviewed by Manek Dubash, who was keen to understand how cloud and wireless fitted together. Larner said that the proliferation of devices in the enterprise as cloud access grows means there is demand for denser wireless networks. He said that the market will grow and that, as a vendor, branding the company as cloud-focused was important. He added that demand for wireless was already growing in a variety of areas, not just the executive suite.

Peter Hall, analyst with Ovum, introduced the next session which discussed self-service and auto-provisioning. Hall outlined how these were key questions for cloud implementations. Clouds are not automated, he said, and today we only have first generation services but you need end-to-end management and automation, and service providers who take responsibility to ensure applications actually work.

On the panel, Steve Garrison, Infoblox, said that what customers want is to stop fixing mundane processes and to automate, although this still needs to gain trust. Customers don't want to go to the public cloud because they don't know how to measure it, and they have no visibility of what's in there, he said.

Phil Tilley, Alcatel-Lucent, said that enterprises need a systems integrator to bring the various elements together to build a cloud solution. Service level agreements are a marketing gimmick unless you can measure it, he said, and that a key technique to prove application performance is deep packet inspection.

Andreas Stern, from testing company Spirent, said cloud providers need to partner. Discussing reliability, he pointed out that failover is an issue: even six nines (99.9999%) availability amounts to 52 minutes per year. Failover can even failover to the wrong network but, like a plane, you have to believe in the pilot and the technology. Defending the cloud will always be a challenge, he said.

That concluded the morning's proceedings, and the plenary broke up for individual meetings.