For Your SDN Reading Pleasure . . .

During a Packet Pushers debate this week about the ongoing relevance of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) involving the formidable Greg Ferro of EtherealMind.com and the lively Derick Winkworth (@cloudtoad on Twitter) of Juniper Networks, a question arose as to whether software defined networking (SDN) and MPLS were compatible.

It was then that I remembered a paper presented at HotSDN (SIGCOMM 2012) in Helsinki, Finland, earlier this summer. That paper, Fabric: A Retrospective on Evolving SDN, was authored by Nicira’s Martin Casado and Teemu Koponen, as well as by Scott Shenker (of both Nicira and UC Berkeley) and Amin Tootoochian of the University of Toronto. The paper essentially proposes that “SDN’s shortcomings . . . can be overcome by adopting the insights underlying MPLS.” It’s a great read, and I’ve written about it previously. 

What I haven’t written about are some of the other great papers that were presented at HotSDN. Well, I am atoning for that omission now. If you have time on your hands this weekend — or at any other time — and you have an interest in what ingenious minds are devising for SDN, I invite you to browse through the variety of papers available at the HotSDN website. You’ll find content on SDN controller and switch design, programming and debugging, support for network services, and wireless and security. On Twitter, I’ve already touted “Kandoo: A Framework for Efficient and Scalable Offloading of Control Applications,” but there are others well worth perusing. 

What strikes me about these papers is how assiduously and quickly the SDN community is closing gaps and shortcomings in the technology. Technologically, SDN is moving at a brisk pace. 

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F5’s Look Ahead

I’ve always admired how F5 Networks built its business. Against what seemed heavy odds at the time, F5 took the fight to Cisco Systems and established market leadership in load balancing, which subsequently morphed into market leadership in application delivery controllers (ADC).

F5 now talks about its “Intelligent Services Platform,” which “connects any user, anywhere, from any device to the best application resources, independent of infrastructure.”

To be sure, as various permutations of cloud computing take hold and mobile devices proliferate, the market is shifting, and F5 is attempting to move with it. To get a feel for how F5 sees the world, where it sees things going, and how it intends to meet new challenges, you might want to have a look at a 211-slide (yes, that many) presentation that company executives made to analysts and investors yesterday. 

By its nature, the presentation is mostly high-level stuff, but it offers interesting nuggets on markets, products, technologies, and partnerships.  

Dell Makes Enterprise Moves, Confronts Dilemma

Dell reported its third-quarter earnings yesterday, and reactions to the news generally made for grim reading. The company cannot help but know that it faces a serious dilemma: It must continue an aggressive shift into enterprise solutions while propping up a punch-drunk personal-computer business that is staggered, bloody, and all but beaten.

The word “dilemma” is particularly appropriate in this context. The definition of dilemma is “a situation in which a difficult choice has to be made between two or more alternatives, especially equally undesirable ones.” 

Hard Choices

Dell seems too attached to the PC to give it up, but in the unlikely event that Dell chose to kick to the commoditized box to the curb, it would surrender a large, though diminishing, pool of low-margin revenue. The market would react adversely, particularly if Dell were not able to accelerate growth in other areas.  

While Dell is growing its revenue in servers and networking, especially the latter, those numbers aren’t rising fast enough to compensate for erosion in what Dell calls “mobility” and “desktop.” What’s more, Dell’s storage business has gone into a funk, with “Dell-owned IP storage revenue” down 3% on a year-to-year basis.

Increased Enterprise Focus

To its credit, Dell seems to recognize that it needs to pull out all the stops. It continues to make acquisitions, most of them related to software, designed bolster its enterprise-solutions profile. Today, in fact, it announced the acquisition of Gale Technologies, and it also announced that Dario Zamarian, a former Cisco executive who has been serving as VP and GM of Dell Networking, has become vice president and general manager of  the newly formed Dell Enterprise Systems & Solutions, “focused on the delivery of converged and enterprise workload topologies and solutions.” Zamarian will report to former HP executive Marius Haas, president of Dell Enterprise Solutions Group. 

Zamarian’s former role as VP and GM of Dell Networking will be assumed by Tom Burns, who comes directly from Alcatel-Lucent, where he served as president of that company’s Enterprise Products Group, which included voice, unified communications, networking, and security solutions.

Dell has the cash to make other acquisitions to strengthen its hand in private and hybrid clouds, and we should expect it to do so.  The company would have more cash to make those moves if it were to divest its PC business, but Dell doesn’t seem willing to bite that bullet. 

That would be a difficult move to make — wiping out substantial revenue while eliminating a piece of the business that is a vestigial piece of Dell’s identity — but half measures aren’t in Dell’s long-term interests.  It needs to be all-in on the enterprise, and I think also needs to adopt a software mindset. As long as the PC business is around, I suspect Dell won’t be able to fully and properly make that transition. 

On Network Engineers and Industry Eccentrics

On Network Engineers

Alan Cohen, former marketing VP at Nicira Networks (until just after it was acquired by VMware), wrote an engrossing piece on the rise and fall of “human IT middleware.” His article deals broadly with how system and network administrators are being displaced by software developers in an IT hierarchy reordered by datacenter virtualization, automation, and cloud computing.

Previously, the future of the networking professional has been discussed and debated in a number of forums. In early 2011, back in the veritable dark ages before the ascent of software-defined networking (SDN), Ziyad Basheer, writing at Greg Ferro’s EtherealMind, wondered about how automation tools would affect network administrators. In June of this year, Derick Winkworth (aka CloudToad), in his last column at Packet Pushers before he joined Juniper Networks, opined on the rise of network-systems engineers. 

Also at Packet Pushers, Ethan Banks subsequently argued that network engineers could survive the onslaught of SDN if they could adapt and master new skills, such as virtualization and network programmability.  Ivan Pepelnjak, though he sounded a more skeptical note on SDN, made a similar point with the aid of his “magic graphs.” 

Regardless of when SDN conquers the enterprise, the consensus is that now is  not the time for complacency. The message: Never stop learning, never stop evolving, and stay apprised of relevant developments. 

On Industry Eccentrics 

Another story this week led me to take a different stroll down memory lane. As I read about the truly bizarre case of John McAfee, recounted in news articles and in recollections of those who knew him, I was reminded of notable eccentrics in the networking industry.

Some of you wizened industry veterans might recall Cabletron Systems, from which Enterasys was derived, run in its idiosyncratic heyday by founders Bob Levine and Craig Benson.   There’s an old Inc. article from 1991, still available online, that captures some of the madness that was Cabletron. Here’s a snippet on Levine: 

He is, after all, prone to excess. Want to know how Levine has spent his newfound wealth? He bought a tank. A real one, with a howitzer on top and turrets that spin around. Last summer, for kicks, he chased a pizza-delivery boy, and the following day while “four-wheeling in the woods,” he ran smack into a tree. He emerged with one less tooth and a concussion. The buddy with him got 17 stitches. Levine also owns 15 guns, which he has, on occasion, used to shoot up his own sprinkler system. His 67-foot Hatteras is named Soldier of Fortune. Some people swear they’ve seen the magazine of the same name lying on his desk. “I’m not a mercenary or anything,” he says with a smile. “But if business ever goes bad. . . . “

Here’s an excerpt from the same article on Benson, who later served as Governor of New Hampshire: 

Last summer Benson joined 40 employees for a Sunday boat trip. Afterward he ordered two of them fired immediately. One had not even started yet. “I hated him,” says Benson, who was eventually persuaded to give the new hire a chance. At sales meetings, reports Kenneth Levine, it’s standard to conduct private polls on who will go next.

You cannot make this stuff up. Well, I couldn’t.

Lest you think networking’s only colorful characters were Cabletron’s dynamic duo, I’d like to reference Henry T. Nicholas III, Broadcom’s founder and former CEO. He even had a Vanity Fair article written about him, though ultimately the lurid charges against Nicholas were dropped.

Cisco’s Chambers Sends Messages on Canada, ZTE

Cisco Systems reported its fiscal first-quarter earnings yesterday. While the market responded favorably, both in after-hours trading and in regular trading early today, some analysts questioned whether Cisco has embarked on an extended period of smooth sailing or is merely experiencing calm before further storms.

That particular vein of prognostication, while interesting, is not what I want to address today. Instead, I want to draw attention to comments made in the last couple days by Cisco CEO John Chambers, both in interviews and on Cisco’s earnings call. 

As we know, Cisco possesses a vast cash hoard, most of which sits offshore.  It’s no secret that Chambers and the Cisco board of directors would like to see the U.S. government provide a repatriation-tax holiday. That was unlikely to happen before a U.S. presidential election, but now that the voting has occurred and the ballots have been counted, Cisco and other U.S.-headquartered companies with massive amounts of offshore cash might be anxious for some near-term tax relief.

Oh, Canada? 

In a series of interviews this week, Cisco’s Chambers repeatedly extolled the virtues of Canada as a potential destination for a large portion of Cisco’s cash holdings.  Chambers says Canada is the world’s “easiest place to do business,” citing the country’s federal corporate-tax rate of 15 percent and its “great education system.” 

Now, Chambers could sincere about what he says about Canada — as a Canadian, I certainly have nothing against the place, and I would welcome Cisco investments in the country — but I think Chambers has other motives. He’s talking about moving money to Canada, but he hasn’t done it yet. When people talk before they do something, they’re often sending messages, either explicit or implicit. In this case, Chambers is speaking to the U.S. government. He’s saying: “Hey, if you don’t give me my tax holiday, I’m not going to repatriate my cash to the U.S. Instead, I’m going to take a huge pile of it to Canada, where I get a better deal from the government.”  

If the U.S. government doesn’t budge, would he actually follow through on a Canadian cash expedition? It’s possible, I suppose, but Canada, while offering lower federal levels of corporate taxation and an education system that Chambers lauds, doesn’t match the U.S. in the range of investment opportunities it would offer. How many Canadian companies, for example, would Cisco wish to acquire?  Answer: Not many — and, no, Research in Motion (RIM) would not be among them. 

China Questions

Yes, Cisco could hire some Canadian engineers, provide early-stage funding to startup companies, and spend some money on relevant research initiatives at Canadian universities. But that would not require tens of billions of dollars. So, while Chambers is talking about Canada, he’s actually talking to his own government in Washington, D.C. 

Now, let’s shift our focus to China, another country mentioned by Chambers on the Cisco earnings call. Cisco’s sales in China were flat in the first quarter, but the company’s leadership team knows that China will be critical to Cisco’s future growth. Despite the national-security concerns that have inhibited expansion by Huawei and ZTE in the United States, Chambers does not foresee a trade war with China, which has amplified recent rhetoric about what it perceives as Western protectionism. 

ZTE: Back in Cisco’s Good Books?

As for Huawei, Chambers said Cisco is more than holding is own competitively against China’s largest networking company. What’s more — and this is the interesting part — Chambers said he sees ZTE as more a partner than a competitor, and indicated that he’s open to “expanding that relationship.” If one considers ZTE’s product portfolio in relation to Huawei’s, what Chambers says make sense. But there’s another aspect to this story (as there often is). 

Some of you with relatively good intermediate-term memory will recall that Reuters reported on October 8 that Cisco had ended a longstanding sales partnership with ZTE “after an internal investigation into allegations that the Chinese telecommunications equipment maker sold Cisco networking gear to Iran.” What’s more, Cisco spokesman John Earnhardt issued the following unambiguous statement to Bloomberg: “Cisco has no current relationship with ZTE.” 

Then again, the Guardian reported the following day that Cisco had “curtailed” its seven-year partnership with ZTE. So, you know, things change, and perhaps they are changing again.  

Big Switch Emphasizes Ecosystem, Channel

Big Switch Networks made the news very early today — one article was posted precisely at midnight ET — with an announcement of general availability of its SDN controller, two applications that run on it, and an ecosystem of partners.

Customers also are in the picture, though it wasn’t made explicit in the Big Switch press release whether Fidelity Investments and Goldman Sachs are running Big Switch’s products in production networks.  In a Network World article, however, Jim Duffy writes that Fidelity and Goldman Sachs are “production customers for the Big Switch Open SDN product suite.” 

Controller, Applications, Ecosystem

The company’s announced products, encompassed within its Open Software Defined Networking architecture, feature the Big Network Controller, a proprietary version of the open-source Floodlight controller, and the two aforementioned applications. An SDN controller without applications is like, well, an operating system without applications. Accordingly, Big Switch has introduced Big Virtual Switch, an application for network virtualization, and Big Tap, a unified network monitoring application. 

Big Virtual Switch is the company’s answer to Nicira’s Network Virtualization Platform (NVP).  Big Switch says the product supports up to 32,000 virtual-network segments and can be integrated with cloud-management platforms such as OpenStack (Quantum), CloudStack, Microsoft System Center, and VMware vCenter.  As Big Switch illustrates on its website, Big Virtual Switch can be deployed on Big Network Controller in pure overlay networks, in pure OpenFlow networks, and in hybrid network-virtualization environments.  

According to the company, Big Virtual Switch can deliver significant CAPEX and OPEX benefits. A graphical figure — tagged Economics of Big Virtual Switch — included in a product data sheet claims the company’s L2/L3 network virtualization facilitates “up to 50% more VMs per rack” and delivers CAPEX savings of $500,000 per rack annually and OPEX savings of $30,000 per rack annually. For those estimates, Big Switch assumes a rack size of 40 servers and suggests savings can be accrued across severs, operating-system instances, storage, networking, and operations. 

Strategies in Flux

Big Virtual Switch and Big Tap are essential SDN applications, but the company’s ultimate success in the marketplace will turn on the support its Big Network Controller receives from third-party vendors. Big Switch is aware of its external dependencies, which is why it has placed so much emphasis on its ecosystem, which it says includes A10 Networks, Arista Networks, Broadcom, Brocade, Canonical, Cariden Technologies, Citrix, Cloudscaling, Coraid, Dell, Endace, Extreme Networks, F5 Networks, Fortinet, Gigamon, Infoblox, Juniper Networks, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, Mirantis, Nebula, Palo Alto Networks, Piston Cloud Computing, Radware, StackOps, ThreatSTOP, and vArmour. The Big Switch press release includes an appendix of “supporting quotes” from those companies, but the company will require more than lip service from its ecosystem. 

Some companies will find that their interests are well aligned with those of Big Switch, but others are likely to be less motivated to put energy and resources into Big Switch’s SDN platform.  If you consider the vendor names listed above, you might deduce that the SDN strategies of more than a few are in flux. Some are considering whether to offer SDN controllers of their own. Even those who have no controller aspirations might be disinclined to bet too heavily or too early on a controller platform. They’ll follow the customers and the money. 

A growing number of commercial controllers are on the market (VMware/Nicira, NEC, and Big Switch) or have been announced as coming to market (IBM, HP, Cisco). Others will follow. Loyalties will shift as controller fortunes wax and wane. 

Courting the Channel 

With that in mind, Big Switch is seeking to enlist channel partners as well as technology partners. In a CRN article, we learn that Big Switch “has begun to recruit systems integrator and data center infrastructure-focused solution providers that can consult and design network architecture using Big Switch software and products from a galaxy of ecosystem partners.” In fact, Big Switch wants all its commercial sales to go through channel partners. 

In the CRN piece, Dave Butler, VP of sales at Big Switch, is candid about the symbiotic relationship the company desires from partners:

“None of our products work well alone in a data center — this is a very rigorous and rich ecosystem of partners. We’ll pay a finder’s fee to anyone who brings the right opportunity to us, but we’re not really a product sale. We need the integrators that can create a bundled solution, because that’s what makes the difference.”

. . . . “We bring them (partners) in as the specialist, and they have probably a greater touch than we might. We are not taking deals direct. Then, you have to do all the work by yourself. This is a perfect solution for their services and expertise. And, they can make money with us.”

Needs a Little Help from Its Friends

The plan is clear. Big Switch’s vendor ecosystem is meant to attract channel partners that already are selling those vendors’ products and are interested in expanding into SDN solutions. The channel partners, including SIs and datacenter-solution providers, will then bring Big Switch’s SDN platform to customers, with whom they have existing relationships. 

In theory, it all coheres. Big Switch knows it can’t go it alone against industry giants. It knows it needs more than a little help from its friends in the vendor community and the channel. 

For Big Switch, the vendor ecosystem expedites channel recruitment, and an effective channel accelerates exposure to customers. Big Switch has to move fast and demonstrate staying power. The controller race is far from over. 

For Huawei and ZTE, Suspicions Persist

About two weeks ago, the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing on “the national-security threats posed by Chinese telecom companies doing business in the United States.” The Chinese telecom companies called to account were Huawei and ZTE, each of which is keen to expand its market reach into the United States.

It is difficult to know what to believe when it comes to the charges leveled against Huawei and ZTE. The accusations against the companies, which involve their alleged capacity to conduct electronic espionage for China and their relationships with China’s government, are serious and plausible but also largely unproven.

Frustrated Ambitions

One would hope these questions could be settled definitively and expeditiously, but this inquiry looks be a marathon rather than a sprint. Huawei and ZTE want to expand in the U.S. market, but their ambitions are thwarted by government concerns about national security.  As long as the concerns remain — and they show no signs of dissipating soon — the two Chinese technology companies face limited horizons in America.

Elsewhere, too, questions have been raised. Although Huawei recently announced a significant expansion in Britain, which received the endorsement of the government there, it was excluded from participating in Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN). The company also is facing increased suspicion in India and in Canada, countries in which it already has made inroads.

Vehement Denials 

Huawei and ZTE say they’re facing discrimination and protectionism in the U.S.  Both seek to become bigger players globally in smartphones, and Huawei has its sights set on becoming a major force in enterprise networking and telepresence.

Obviously, Huawei and ZTE deny the allegations. Huawei has said it would be self-destructive for the company to function as an agent or proxy of Chinese-government espionage. Huawei SVP Charles Ding, as quoted in a post published on the Forbes website, had this to say:

 As a global company that earns a large part of its revenue from markets outside of China, we know that any improper behaviour would blemish our reputation, would have an adverse effect in the global market, and ultimately would strike a fatal blow to the company’s business operations. Our customers throughout the world trust Huawei. We will never do anything that undermines that trust. It would be immensely foolish for Huawei to risk involvement in national security or economic espionage.

Let me be clear – Huawei has not and will not jeopardise our global commercial success nor the integrity of our customers’ networks for any third party, government or otherwise. Ever.

A Telco Legacy 

Still, questions persist, perhaps because Western countries know, from their own experience, that telecommunications equipment and networks can be invaluable vectors for surveillance and intelligence-gathering activities. As Jim Armitage wrote in The Independent, telcos in Europe and the United States have been tapped repeatedly for skullduggery and eavesdropping.

In one instance, involving the tapping  of 100 mobile phones belonging to Greek politicians and senior civil servants in 2004 and 2005, a Vodafone executive was found dead of an apparent suicide. In another case, a former head of security at Telecom Italia fell off a Naples motorway bridge to his death in 2006 after discovering the illegal wiretapping of 5,000 Italian journalists, politicians, magistrates, and — yes — soccer players.

No question, there’s a long history of telco networks and the gear that runs them being exploited for “spookery” (my neologism of the day) gone wild. That historical context might explain at least some of the acute and ongoing suspicion directed at Chinese telco-gear vendors by U.S. authorities and politicians.

Cisco Puts ACE in the Hole (or Maybe Not)

Although Cisco reportedly confirmed that it will discontinue further development of its Application Control Engine (ACE), a Cisco representative now says that it isn’t the case, and that ACE will be developed further.

Regardless of what Cisco eventually does with ACE, we have not seen the last of the company in the application-delivery controller (ADC) market. In fact, the latest indications, as published in articles at SearchNetworking and The Register, suggest that Cisco, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator, will be back.

The salient question is whether Cisco’s next foray into the ADC market, regardless of the form it takes, will produce results any different from its previous efforts, which were catalogued by yours truly about two years ago. Indeed, Cisco has been beaten consistently and repeatedly by F5 Networks in load balancing. Cisco’s losing streak goes back more than a decade, and it is likely to continue if the company stumbles back into the market halfheartedly.

While there is no question that F5 has gotten the better of Cisco continually in load balancing, a more interesting question relates to why Cisco has failed. One line of reasoning suggests that Cisco neither understands nor appreciates Layer 4-7 network services, including load balancing and WAN optimization. Cisco, this argument asserts, is a switching and routing company, proficient at layers 2 and 3, but woefully out of its comfort zone higher up the stack.

Bigger Picture

There’s some legitimacy to that argument, but it doesn’t provide a complete picture. More often than not, Cisco’s load-balancing products and technologies were predicated on the fruits of acquisitions rather than on organic innovation. That is true going all the way back to the long-dead LocalDirector, which was based on technology Cisco obtained through the acquisition of Network Translation Inc. in 1996. Subsequent to that, Cisco acquired former F5 competitor ArrowPoint Communications for $5.7 billion in 2000.  The personnel in these load-balancing companies clearly understood network services, even if the old-guard switching and routing stalwarts at Cisco did not.

So, we’re left with two possibilities. Cisco made bad acquisition choices, effectively acquiring the wrong load-balancing companies, or Cisco failed to execute properly in taking the products and technologies of the acquired companies to market. I’m leaning toward the latter scenario.

Cisco’s primary problem in areas such as load balancing and WAN optimization, as it has been expressed to me by former Cisco executives, is that the company strategically understands that it needs to play in these markets, but that it invariably fails to make the commitment necessary to success. Why is that?

A Matter of Focus and Priority

It comes down to market sizes and business priorities. Switching and routing always ruled the roost, and the resources, at Cisco. That’s still true today, perhaps even to a greater extent now that the company is coming under renewed attack in its core markets after failing to break new ground in many of what CEO John Chambers called the company’s market adjacencies. (Flip, anyone?)

Fundamentally, nothing seems to have changed. Cisco might take another run at ADCs, but there’s no reason to suppose that it would end differently this time unless Cisco makes a sustained and uncompromising commitment to the market and the technologies. Nothing less will do.

Cisco can be sure that is ADC competitors, as in the past, will not give it any breaks.

Questioning SDN Cynicism

A few months ago, I noticed that the networking cognoscenti were becoming jaded about software-defined networking (SDN). To be fair, the networking cognoscenti can skew toward disgruntlement, so it was no surprise to see this restive bunch cast a jaundiced eye toward networking’s greatest, latest hope.

I consider myself among the skeptical and wary, always cognizant that vendors can be inclined to advance a self-serving agenda that sometimes is designed to satisfy their own near-term interests over the long-term objectives of their customers. That works particularly well when the vendors can trick the customers into believing that they’re actually looking out for them. As our ancient forebears knew, caveat emptor was more than a catchphrase.

Asking Why

All of which brings me to a puzzling aspect of the current disaffection with SDN, expressed most recently in a highly readable and strongly recommended post by Ethan Banks of PacketPushers fame. My question, which I put to Banks to and to everyone else for whom SDN has become an annoyance, is simple: Are you really upset with SDN, or are you actually frustrated with the way the term has been used and abused by the vendor community?

It’s not an academic or an idle question.

One should remember that SDN, properly defined and understood, is a creation of a customer-centric consortium, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), not a marketing or technical construct espoused by a given networking vendor or even by a group of vendors. If the term “SDN” is being bastardized and demeaned, it is not the ONF that is doing it. More directly, if the term is being cheapened, the devaluation is occurring at the hands of vendors.

But why? There are at least two possibilities. One is that certain networking vendors want to exploit the positive connotations, the afterglow, that surrounded software-defined networking (SDN). According to this theory, the damage they’re inflicting to the SDN brand is unintentional and ironic: They wanted to ride SDN’s relatively pristine coattails, not pull it into a seedy gutter of disrepute. I would be inclined to accept this theory if vendors adopted SDN definitions that accorded with that of the ONF, but. for the most part, that’s not what’s happened.

Agents Provocateurs: Back in Action 

Instead, vendors typically recast SDN in forms that correspond with product roadmaps and company-specific strategic objectives.  The result has been market confusion and cynicism, understandably so. When a term is spun to mean practically anything to anyone, it risks losing its specificity and its relevance.

Allow me suggest that at least a few vendors would be neither inconvenienced nor unduly troubled to see SDN’s identity fractured and splintered like a broken mirror.  It would not be the first time that fear, uncertainty, and doubt were deployed as agents provocateurs in a commercial context.

Nonetheless, coming back to my question above, I would counsel that we think carefully about whether our annoyance is really with SDN or with the way the term “SDN” is being manipulated and distorted by the vendor community.

As always, it is helpful to diagnose not only what is happening, but to try to understand why it is happening, too.

Northbound API: The Standardization Debate

During the last several months, several extremely informative articles and posts have been written about the significance of the northbound API (or NB API) within the context of software-defined networking (SDN).

We’ve seen two posts on the topic at SDN Central, one written in April by David Lenrow and another written by Roy Chua in early July.  Brent Salisbury, on his blog NetworkStatic, offered an excellent exegesis on the northbound API in June, and he touched on the topic again in a subsequent post in July that dealt with how he believes SDN APIs will evolve. At GigaOm, Stacey Higginbotham also has written on the subject, as have I both here and at TechTarget’s SearchNetworking.

Recently, Greg Ferro, of EtherealMind renown, provided an instructive overview on SDN APIs, opining that it is “unlikely that Northbound APIs will never standardise but I’m not aware of any initiatives in this area.”

I don’t know whether northbound APIs, as Greg suggests, will never standardize, but I do know that most knowledgeable observers (including the aforementioned parties) believe that there should no headlong rush toward standardization. The consensus is that SDN’s northbound APIs should be given an opportunity to flourish first, and that the market ultimately should vote with its feet and with its wallets.

Too Early?

That said, there are those who believe standards bodies should play a role, even at this nascent stage, in defining SDN’s northbound API.  In fact, the matter was raised yesterday on a discussion thread for the IETF’s software-driven network protocol (SDNP) BOF mailing list, where some argued that the Open Networking Foundation’s (ONF) reluctance to begin standardization work on the northbound API — the ONF reportedly will incorporate northbound-API discussions into deliberations of its recently formed architecture workgroup — opened the door for IETF involvement.

Often, but not always, proponents of near-term northbound-API standardization are representatives of legacy vendors familiar with the standards-definition process. (At this point, I feel strangely compelled to invoke the quote often misattributed to Otto von Bismarck regarding the similarity of laws to sausages: “Laws are like sausages. You should never watch them being made.” I believe this maxim also applies to IETF standards.)

The point here, though, isn’t to render a value judgment on who’s right and who’s wrong. What’s salient is that there is stark disagreement on whether the question of the northbound API can and should be settled by market forces or by vendor comity (and committee). Watching to see which players line up on either side of the divide, and how they defend their positions, will be instructive.

Avaya Executive Departures, Intrigue Continue

Like many other vendors, Avaya showed off its latest virtualized wares at VMworld in San Francisco this week. While putting its best face forward at VMware’s annual conference and exhibition, Avaya also experienced further behind-the-scenes executive intrigue.

Sources report that Carelyn Monroe, VP of Global Partner Support Services, resigned from the company last Friday. Monroe is said to have reported to Mike Runda, SVP and president of Avaya Client Services. She joined Avaya in 2009, coming over from Nortel.

Meanwhile, across the pond, Avaya has suffered another defection. James Stevenson, described as a “business-services expert” in a story published online by CRN ChannelWeb UK, has left Avaya to become director of operations for reseller Proximity Communications.

Prior to the departures of Monroe and Stevenson, CFO Anthony Massetti bolted for the exit door immediately after Avaya’s latest inauspicious quarterly results were filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Massetti was replaced by Dave Vellequette, who has a long history of of working alongside Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy.

In some quarters, Kennedy’s reunion with Vellequette is being construed as a circle-the-wagons tactic in which the besieged CEO attempts to surround himself with steadfast loyalists. It probably won’t be long before we see a “Hitler parody” on YouTube about Avaya’s plight (like this one on interoperability problems with unified communications).

Between What Is and What Will Be

I have refrained from writing about recent developments in software-defined networking (SDN) and in the larger realm of what VMware, now hosting VMworld in San Francisco, calls the  “software-defined data center” (SDDC).

My reticence hasn’t resulted from indifference or from hype fatigue — in fact, these technologies do not possess the jaundiced connotations of “hype” — but from a realization that we’ve entered a period of confusion, deception, misdirection, and murk.  Amidst the tumult, my single, independent voice — though resplendent in its dulcet tones — would be overwhelmed or forgotten.

Choppy Transition

We’re in the midst of a choppy transitional period. Where we’ve been is behind us, where we’re going is ahead of us, and where we find ourselves today is between the two. So-called legacy vendors, in both networking and compute hardware, are trying to slow progress toward the future, which will involve the primacy of software and services and related business models. There will be virtualized infrastructure, but not necessarily converged infrastructure, which is predicated on the development and sale of proprietary hardware by a single vendor or by an exclusive club of vendors.

Obviously, there still will be hardware. You can’t run software without server hardware, and you can’t run a network without physical infrastructure. But the purpose and role of that hardware will change. The closed box will be replaced by an open one, not because of any idealism or panglossian optimism, but because of economic, operational, and technological imperatives that first are remaking the largest of public-cloud data centers and soon will stretch into private clouds at large enterprises.

No Wishful Thinking

After all, the driving purpose of the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) involved shifting the balance of power into the hands of customers, who had their own business and operational priorities to address. Where legacy networking failed them, SDN provided a way forward, saving money on capital expenditures and operational costs while also providing flexibility and responsiveness to changing business and technology requirements.

The same is true for the software-defined data center, where SDN will play a role in creating a fluid pool of virtualized infrastructure that can be utilized to optimal business benefit. What’s important to note is that this development will not be restricted to the public cloud-service providers, including all the big names at the top of the ONF power structure. VMware, which coined software-defined data center, is aiming directly for the private cloud, as Greg Ferro mentioned in his analysis of VMware’s acquisition of Nicira Networks.

Fighting Inevitability

Still, it hasn’t happened yet, even though it will happen. Senior staff and executives at the incumbent vendors know what’s happening, they know that they’re fighting against an inevitability, but fight it they must. Their organizations aren’t built to go with this flow, so they will resist it.

That’s where we find ourselves. The signal-to-noise ratio isn’t great. It’s a time marked by disruption and turmoil. The dust and smoke will clear, though. We can see which way the wind is blowing.