Enterprise SDN: Harnessing ‘containers as a service’

 

Hyper-scale SDDC and enterprise SDN use cases

A major market for telcos will be the enterprise adoption of SDN. They will be able to harness the SDN/NFV innovations from the telco industry, and apply the technologies within their data centres, as well as using new telco services that they enable.

As SearchDataCenter describes, NFV offers the potential to unify the data centre, and will be driven under an overall umbrella of SDDC: the software defined data centre.

VMware explains why enterprises are ready for network virtualisation, and positions their NSX technology as a platform for SDDC. Example use case scenarios are being pioneered such as Virtual Customer Edge – the ability to virtualise the customer edge either through creation of a virtualised platform on customer premises.

The trend will see different industry partnership models emerge, exploring ways for industry supply chain combinations to exploit this specific opportunity. For example Telehouse partnered with Aryaka to offer SDN-augmented WAN services.

Also the hardware vendors are marketing specific programs targeting the sweet spot of telcos looking to compete with Amazon et al, via a hyper-scale data centre, announcing an early implementation partner through SKT Telecom. This type of ‘hyper-scale’ data centre technology will be harnessed by the large enterprise market and also as part of adopting SDN.

Containers as a service

The scenario and market opportunity is particularly exciting when you consider the sheer size of this enterprise sector, and also the potential for disruptive innovations to radically transform how some providers achieve competitive advantage through unique product positioning, those that best exploit the Cloud Native platform.

For example in this VentureBeat article Peter Yared, CTO of Sapho, explores a scenario he describes as ‘containers as a service’. In short, a “hybrid SaaS” capability that delivers subscription-based software via a SaaS-like model, but it is deployed on-premise to the client via containers. With containers hosting SDN services as well as these apps, then the network market could be attacked via the same disruptive principle and enabling technical architecture.

Vendors like Nuage offer SDN platform solutions, and in this articlediscuss the scenario of using containers this way.

 

[Source:- cloudcomputing]