SD-WAN unbox your branch office
Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) have revolutionized the world of networking. NFV’s success in telecom space and the imagination of a few experts to extend to this enterprise have given
birth to the idea of Enterprise Network Functions Virtualization (ENFV). The concept of physical network appliances is going away, leaving only the switch as the lone wolf in the appliances space. Moving every network appliance
from a physical world to virtual and packing them in a single x86 appliance is possible now. This Point of View (PoV) document discusses about one such trend of virtualizing important network and security functions and therefore
making the branch networks run from a single box.
Current approach and its challenges
Large corporations of various industry verticals such as retail or banking heavily rely on branches in conducting day-to-day business for one simple reason – they are closer to the consumer of their products or services. While
cloudification has successfully moved the applications to a central location, the people who need to access these applications are distributed across the country or globe. However, with the increasing costs and need for consolidation
it’s no longer possible to have an IT staff member in each branch. Some of these branches may be as small as 5-10 employees. With increasing complexity in technologies, the generic IT administrators no longer can handle highly
specialized IT tasks. You need specialized operating system administrators, back-up administrators, IT security staff and somebody to manage them all. Of course, a branch cannot afford an expansive IT department. Management
of Head Quarters IT or the data centers are being outsourced to commercial outsourcing & professional services organizations. Can you manage a branch with no IT staff? Seems unrealistic, but with the branch-in-a-box approach,
it’s doable.
New approach – Virtualized Branch Networking
Virtualized Branch Networking with the power of hyper-convergence is the new approach that is geared-up to address the above shortcomings.
- It eliminates multiple appliances, converging them to a single appliance or a commodity x86 server
- Redundancy is still a challenge, but can be addressed through software methods
- Easier to replace an x86 server with the latest machine or scale it with additional memory and storage
- No branch IT staff required
- Option to centrally back-up the data (real-time or after office hours) and restore it when branch fails
This is achieved through virtualization of network functions including routing, wireless LAN controller, firewall, and virtualized servers for running various local applications. Switch may be still required, but a small network switch (supported by few
manufacturers now) as a module in the server itself, serves the purpose. Access points cannot be replaced though.
Benefits
- Minimize power consumption of several devices
- Less space required (instead of a 42U rack, go for a 19U mounted cabinet rack)
- Data loss eliminated
- Improved security
- Better user experience
Critical success factors
- Ability to support Ethernet and other WAN terminations
- Ability to support hardware level redundancy
- Ability to support 3G/4G
- Ability to restore the base image of the appliance/server using an USB/flash storage
- Centralized backup and restoration
- Wider support for business applications
- Advanced security feature sets