Two years ago, Avaya dismissed Software-Defined Networking (SDN). In a May 2013 in-house interview the firm\u2019s chief architect, Paul Unbehagen, described SDN as \u201cnot new\u201d, noted that network switches and routers already ran on software, and tried to promote the term \u201cApplication-Driven Networking\u201d (ADN) instead.<\/p>\n
History records that the market did not agree.<\/p>\n
SDN\u2019s continuing popularity with enterprises has seen Avaya left somewhat on the side-lines \u2013 despite the company\u2019s insistence that its Fabric Connect networking range solves many of the problems SDN claims to tackle. Indeed, Fabric Connect is now seeing a dramatic increase in implementations, with a \u201chockey stick\u201d curve in sales over the last 18 months.<\/p>\n
According to Avaya, while it took around 10 quarters to achieve the first 50 deployments, it needed just three quarters for the next 50, and one quarter for the 50 after that. Now Fabric Connect is running at around one deployment per day, with 205 live deployments worldwide, and 15 in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
But without an SDN offering of its own, it was becoming difficult for Avaya to make itself heard in one of the key areas for networking technology. Now, the networking firm is ready to make its move: this month will see the launch of Avaya\u2019s SDN Fx range \u2013 the \u201cFx\u201d highlighting the offering\u2019s fabric-based heritage.<\/p>\n
Jean Turgeon, VP and chief technologist for Software Defined Architecture at Avaya, acknowledges the networking firm needs to be visible in the SDN conversation: \u201cToday when people Google SDN, our brand name does not come up at the top of the list \u2013 that\u2019s what we want to change.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs customers continue to believe that SDN is fundamentally the right solution for their future, and come to realise that we\u2019re already solving 80-90% of the promises the competition is making, then we believe it\u2019s going to grow our opportunities exponentially,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
The SDN Fx product ranges will include Fabric Extend, to stretch a network across WANs and public Internet, which is available today; Fabric Attach, to incorporate non-fabric switches into the architecture; and Fabric Orchestrate, which will allow a fabric-based network to interact with non-fabric infrastructure and other SDN controllers. The new products will enter beta testing in the next few months, and are slated for mid-year delivery to customers.<\/p>\n
Turgeon is very insistent that Avaya\u2019s approach to SDN is far superior to its competitors, and benefits from the firm\u2019s different approach to networking infrastructure. Its fabric architecture, he says, already eliminates many of the issues other SDN vendors are still struggling to solve, thanks to its underlying simplicity and flexibility.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did Avaya do differently? We said: you have 12 protocols? Now you have one. We did not spend a minute trying to build a software-based controller, to build an abstraction layer \u2013 we eliminated all 12 protocols. We can build an entire network today with one protocol \u2013 nobody else can do that,\u201d says Turgeon.<\/p>\n
Avaya\u2019s SDN advantages rest with price, interoperability and flexibility, according to Turgeon. Thanks to Broadcom\u2019s inclusion of Avaya\u2019s technology within its ASICs, the cost of a core fabric switch is now around $3,000 \u2013 and moving to a fabric architecture does not mean abandoning existing infrastructure.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost SDN positioning today, from our competitors, is a complete rip, which is not very cost-effective. If organisations are looking at lowering the TCO, it ain\u2019t gonna happen in the next little while \u2013 because if they endorse SDN, first it\u2019s a set of promises to get to simplification,\u201d says Turgeon.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe maintain interoperability with the legacy \u2013 the same nodes can run in fabric and in legacy mode simultaneously, so we have a transition and an evolution from the existing infrastructure, as opposed to a revolution or a complete forklift,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
He also makes a big play of Fabric Connect\u2019s security features: \u201cWith our zones, we are no longer using VLAN technology \u2013 the zone is secured by default. No access control lists (ACLs). This zone cannot talk to any other zone \u2013 end of discussion. You cannot penetrate it, you cannot hack it, you cannot do anything to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
This also extends to BYOD, with Fabric Connect offering the ability to dynamically and automatically provision specified services for devices, and then withdraw them when a device disconnects. This approach eliminates several vulnerabilities, including the ability for a hacker to replay a session or reuse authentication tokens.<\/p>\n
Avaya has made some bold claims for its fabric architecture in recent months, citing a customer survey\u2019s findings that its architecture is 11 times faster to implement, seven times faster to configure, and with 100% elimination of outages due to human error. While it is easy to be sceptical of these numbers, Turgeon says he stands behind them \u2013 because they exceeded even Avaya\u2019s internal numbers.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at reliability, customers came back and said on average they get 13 minutes of business outages when they get a network outage \u2013 the network may have recovered in 25 seconds, but the business has not. After fabric, 320 milliseconds. That\u2019s better than what we expected \u2013 and in fact, when they started to say they hadn\u2019t had an outage since they implemented fabric, you can\u2019t ask for better,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
With the launch of SDN Fx, Avaya is now formally a player in the SDN game. Analysts suggest it has a compelling offering \u2013 Zeus Kerravala told CRN this month the firm had \u201can excellent fabric story\u201d and was a \u201cdark horse\u201d \u2013 but faces an uphill battle against giants such as Cisco in capturing major market share.<\/p>\n
Read the\u00a0full interview with Avaya’s Jean Turgeon, VP and chief technologist for Software Defined Architecture at Avaya, in the upcoming issue of Inside_Networks_ME<\/strong> \t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two years ago, Avaya dismissed Software-Defined Networking (SDN). In a May 2013 in-house interview the firm\u2019s chief architect, Paul Unbehagen, described SDN as \u201cnot new\u201d, noted that network switches and routers already ran on software, and tried to promote the term \u201cApplication-Driven Networking\u201d (ADN) instead. History records that the market did not agree. SDN\u2019s continuing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":1464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,38,332,13],"tags":[279,215],"class_list":["post-1463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insights","category-networking","category-software","category-top-stories","tag-avaya","tag-software-defined-networking-sdn"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/me\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}