A presentation by Avaya Networking's Randall Cross explaining Avaya's vision around Application Driven Networking, its view as a successor to the hot Software-Defined Networking (SDN) trend.
These come directly from the ONF, as founding board members.
Starting from the perspective of the End-User, Avaya’s software-defined networking vision would integrate highly granular profiling of person, device, access, location, and schedule; ensuring appropriate accesses and optimized class of service are applied, and that the application and traffic patterns relevant to individual Users where fully translated into meaningful definitions. An example of this capability could be such that, based upon a User-specific profile, the network path to support a regular video collaboration session is proactively pre-provisioned, tested, and assured, and simply awaiting the ‘call’ button being pressed.
It's obvious that collaboration is increasingly being performed on mobile and non-business devices; the confluence of the ‘Access Anywhere’ and ‘BYOD’ trends. Genuinely integrating access with the corporate network for this plethora of new, non-traditional Wireless devices will challenge most of today’s commonly deployed overlay Wi-Fi solutions. Avaya had anticipated this requirement and pioneered an innovative new approach with the introduction of our Unified Access solution; enabling new level of scalability, performance, integration, and efficiency. A software-defined networking would deliver further enhancements such as higher scalability through virtualization of the control function, and the complete integration of proactive quality assurance tools. The latter being particularly important given the vagaries commonly associated with any form of Wireless, but far from acceptable in a business context, especially given the elevated User expectations of increasingly sophisticated offerings such as Skype.
Indeed, genuinely proactive and application-aware quality assurance is becoming particularly important given the vagaries commonly associated with any form of Wireless, but with User expectations being progressively elevated by increasingly sophisticated offerings such as Skype, the classic excuses for sub-optimal Wireless – when operated within the business context – no longer hold water. As the End-User becomes more literate – personified by a younger, more tech-savvy workforce – expectations inevitably rise; the same is true of customers. Avaya’s vision takes proven capabilities that we’re delivering today in professional services offerings, and bundles these into a turnkey bolt-on that leverages embedded smart agents deployed pervasively throughout the network, reporting application-by-application performance metrics. This real-time holistic view of application performance is used northbound by applications to tune expectations and features, customizing the experience, and southbound to both proactive and reactively schedule network resources.
Linking your business systems to your communications infrastructure should be simple, and it should be open and accessible, levering a broad, independent eco-system of developers. This model fosters innovation and competitive advantage. This is precisely what Avaya strives to deliver with our Agile Communications Environment. Users enjoy unprecedented freedom, access to their preferred devices, collaborating across all multiple business applications in a consistent, unified way. When facilitating direct User interaction with enterprise-wide business processes, decisions are faster, and personal productivity is accelerated, as is responsiveness to customers. Avaya has years of experience in application-centric communications enablement, and Avaya's collaboration environment is an obvious point of integration, offering fine-grained toolkits for application sequencing in SIP environments.
As we delve deeper into the heart of our software-defined networking vision, indeed into the core of the network itself, we look to leverage the power of open-source developed tools for the management, provisioning, automation, and orchestration of a multitude of disparate resources. OpenStack is the tool that currently offers both vendors and users most functionality and agile. Developed under the stewardship of the OpenStack Foundation, OpenStack’s Cloud Operation System offers extensible abstraction and orchestration of networking, compute, and Storage, all through an open applications programming interface that offers a bi-directional conduit to optimize the availability and performance of enterprise applications. OpenStack, with its core philosophy of being vendor-neutral and pluggable, together with a broad-based development community (numbering in the hundreds of organizations), lends itself to delivering innovative, versatile capabilities. OpenStack solutions benefit hugely from their key tenant that ‘development decisions are based purely on merit’, without regard to the political influence that adversely affects some other technology initiatives and attempts at standards definition.
We envision leveraging OpenStack-based functionality to further extend our existing abstraction, orchestration, and automation capabilities; Avaya’s Virtualization and Provisioning Service currently delivers direct and automated network integration with virtual machine administration tools such as VMware’s vCenter. It’s universally recognized that the network has lagged behind the pace of virtualization of both compute and storage resources, making it difficult for businesses to fully realize their potential and opportunity; certainly VPS – as part of a broader Fabric Connect capabilities – seamlessly integrates network virtualization into a holistic virtualization solution. OpenStack plugins will further enhance and extend this potential throughout the Data Center, offering new levels of resource automation and optimization.
Effective storage convergence, integration, and networking are crucial elements of any next-generation Data Center strategy. Reliable, efficient content deposit and retrieval is vital, with the transition to composite application architectures, and the adoption of business operations intelligence applications – often based on communications-enabled business processes and complex-event processing – driving radical new requirements for both object and block storage components. Here, Avaya’s software-defined networking vision will bring real pioneering innovation to perhaps the one area of infrastructure most at need of new thinking. For years the traditional approach to storage area networking has delivered little benefit from the efficiencies and commoditization that have been the catalyst for improvements in other areas of computing, and Avaya’s software-defined networking vision will offer a revolutionary new take on this most critical of all resources.
By creating one contiguous, end-to-end Fabric, Avaya is empowering businesses to achieve unprecedented levels of infrastructure productivity, service agility, and network dependability, the very essence of the fast, flexible, and secure design aspirations. The Avaya VENA Fabric Connect solution enables businesses to build a Cloud-grade infrastructure that is extensible from data center to campus and beyond; end-to-end network virtualization is a crucial differentiation of VENA. Designed for next-generation networking, Fabric Connect is a flexible solution that can be tailored to fit current business needs while providing a smooth migration path that accommodates natural or dramatic evolution. Addressing the crucial data center requirements, Fabric Connect creates self-aware network infrastructures that simplify the logical provisioning of network services and provide the components required to create a simplified, network- wide solution that features active/active connectivity and service-orientated networking from Top-of-Rack to Core.