Graham Walker is a Senior Product Manager. He has worked with Allied Telesis Labs in New Zealand for 12 years.
His main role is to drive the development of the network operating system used on the company's flagship switches and next generation firewalls. He also enjoys evangelizing new products, gathering customer requirements and dreaming up new ways to market technical concepts.
Click here to read the full interview
Enterprise SDN – An Allied Telesis Model
SDN is still in its infancy and, at the moment, no one really knows where the journey will lead. What the future holds is open and the possibilities are endless. Currently, the focus is on data centers, but soon the challenge will shift towards delivering the benefits of SDN to enterprise users.One of the benefits of SDN is centralized management, where the entire network can be managed from a single location. At Allied Telesis we have already built a management solution based on this principle to simplify the IT management of enterprise networks. The Allied Telesis Management Framework (AMF) simplifies network management, reduces costs and frees up the time of skilled staff to better use them on proactive projects rather than reactive maintenance.
In parallel with AMF, Allied Telesis is developing switching products that will offer an OpenFlow capability so they can be easily integrated into SDN applications. These products will be hybrids, offering both OpenFlow and traditional intelligent switching capabilities, configurable on a per-port basis. This provides flexibility for the user and an easy migration path to incrementally upgrade an existing network with as much SDN as appropriate for their business. Read more
- Mainstream Organizations Should Prepare for SDN Now
- Andrew Lerner | Ronni J. Colville
- 18 March 2014
- Mainstream organizations must now strategize for the networking paradigm shift represented by software-defined networking (SDN). This research identifies a pragmatic road map for I&O leaders to leverage the benefits associated with SDN.
Key Challenges
- SDN is a radical new way of networking and requires senior infrastructure leaders to rethink traditional networking practices and paradigms.
- Major vendors are releasing SDN solutions aimed at mainstream IT, but they have dramatically different approaches and architectures.
- Modern network operations activities often require manual input and are often disconnected from the applications and services running on them.
Recommendations
IT organizations should take these five key steps in preparation for SDN:
- Senior infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders must identify the key drivers and use cases that SDN can address within their organizations.
- IT leaders should deploy SDN opportunistically in accordance with specific initiatives or to meet specific use cases, versus deploying as an infrastructure "upgrade."
- Senior IT leaders must enable cross-functional collaboration and should investigate DevOps methodologies to better integrate server/virtualization, networking and application teams.
- IT managers must allocate resources to investigate SDN, supporting trial evaluations of both incumbent and nonincumbent vendors.
- Network designers should establish a "line in the sand" to ensure that new networking investments include SDN capability.
- Introduction
Gartner defines SDN as a new approach to designing, building and operating networks that brings a degree of agility to networks similar to what abstraction, virtualization and orchestration have brought to server infrastructure. SDN requires a new approach from both a technology and organizational perspective.
Early adopters of SDN included operators of mega-scale data centers such as Google and NTT Communications – largely driven by their massive scale. However, there has been a large degree of recent mainstream hype around the technology, capped off by a 10-week period in late 2013 in which several vendors – including VMware, Juniper Networks and Cisco – released (or announced) their SDN (and related) solutions. As a result, interest in SDN is extending from Type A organizations to Type B organizations looking to leverage the benefits afforded via SDN (see Note 1).1
Allied Telesis Content
- Allied Telesis Unveils more details about its Vision for Software Defined Networking (SDN)
- Allied Telesis recognized that previous SDN innovations had primarily focused on the control plane. Read more
- SDN and the Changing Face of Enterprise Networks – Allied Telesis White Paper
- Enterprise data networks have evolved rapidly over the last few decades, and are continuing to evolve at a steady pace. To read about Allied Telesis initiatives in enterprise SDN click here to download the White Paper.
- SDN – A Catch 22 for the UK Enterprise Market (article published in Information Age, contributed by Chris Hay, Solutions Architect, Allied Telesis, UK)
- It may well be too early to look at SDN for the majority of enterprises, but managing the network effectively is critical now. There is a clear requirement to drive down costs and reduce network complexity and that means putting the focus on practical aspects of managing and upgrading a network.
Read more
- Allied Telesis have produced a series of videos regarding AMF
- AMF – An Introduction
This video describes the Allied Telesis Management Framework (AMF) and how this powerful suite of management tools can automate your everyday network administration tasks. - Centralized Network Management
This video shows how the management of modern complex networks can be greatly simplified with the Allied Telesis Management Framework (AMF)
- Open Networking Foundation
- Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a user-driven organization dedicated to the promotion and adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) through open standards development. Allied Telesis are a Member of this Foundation.
