Telehouse Global Spotlight: Software-Defined Networking and the Data Center
April 12, 2017Enhancing Connectivity for the Globalized Economy
As enterprises both large and small become increasingly globalized, expanding their businesses across cities, countries and even continents, their networks must grow with them. Software-Defined Networking addresses the fact that the static architecture of conventional networks has become ill-suited to the computing and storage needs of today’s global data center environments and the organizations they serve.
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture that is adaptable, manageable and cost-effective, making it ideal for the dynamic, high-bandwidth nature of today’s applications. This architecture decouples the network control and forwarding functions, enabling the network control to become directly programmable, and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted for applications and network services. SDN facilitates the deployment of applications that make it easier for a widely-dispersed, global workforce to communicate and collaborate with each other.
Some of the key computing trends driving the need for SDN include the rise of cloud services, Big Data, and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend. Moreover, applications that commonly access geographically distributed databases and servers through public and private clouds require extremely flexible traffic management and access to bandwidth on demand – something that SDN delivers. SDN restores control of the network to the network administrator, enabling a company to scale its network based on its own considerations, rather than based on existing vendor solutions. It provides more flexibility in configuring network traffic flow, better monitoring and smoother removal of inefficiencies and bottlenecks that would affect performance.
According to Viavi Solutions’ ninth annual “State of the Network” report, in a survey of CIOs, IT directors and network engineers around the world, two out of three respondents claim to have deployed some facet of SDN. Organizations view Software-Defined Networking as a means to rapidly deploy new applications, services and infrastructure to quickly meet changing business goals and objectives. And by limiting the need to purchase purpose-built, ASIC-based networking hardware, and instead, supporting pay-as-you-grow models, SDN reduces CapEx.
Carrier-neutral colocation facilities enhance global enterprise network deployments and interconnection by leveraging SDN. Telehouse has an extensive portfolio of data centers around the world in North America, Europe and Asia. Utilizing SDN, customers can quickly provision compute, storage and networking resources anywhere on this global network of 48 data centers in 13 countries and 24 cities worldwide.
