IT Briefcase Exclusive Interview with Napatech: The Future of Network Appliances

The interconnected, mobile world has created a data deluge of near-biblical proportions. Networks are being bombarded with data from hundreds, even thousands of end points, at network speeds up to 100Gbps. As the need to support high-bandwidth services continues to grow, the requirement for greater throughput is driving a steep rise in the penetration of 100G networks.

In this interview, Dan Joe Barry, VP Positioning and Chief Evangelist for Napatech, speaks with IT Briefcase about the results of a recent Heavy Reading survey of communications service provider (CSP) and network equipment provider (NEP) registrants regarding the current use of both traditional hardware and virtualized network appliances.

• Q: Tell us about this new survey.

A: It’s called “The Future of Network Appliances” and was conducted by Heavy Reading on behalf of Napatech. Results of the survey make it clear that the virtualization of network appliances is well under way but that the predominant speed at which network appliances will have to operate will be 100G by 2018. One of the key findings of the survey is that the market for network appliances is strong; 47 percent of respondents ranked network appliances as essential, while another 39 percent ranked them as valuable. However, there is a fundamental transition taking place in the network appliance space, driven by increased transport network throughput and the impact of virtualization.

Over the last three years, significant strides have been made in establishing software- defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), with dozens of successful proofs of concept and even limited-scale network deployments. But the prospect of widespread 100G network speeds adds a new level of complexity, which may give many in the SDN/NFV world a headache.

• Q: Why is that?

A: Well, first we have to give some background about the current state of things. The survey asked, “What are your company’s most common current and planned data rates for its access, metro and core networks?” This covered data rates of 1G, 10G, 40G and 100G. As expected, 10G dominates now with 36 percent, 46 percent and 36 percent share of respondents in core, metro and access respectively. However, by 2018, the picture shifts dramatically. In the core, 100G will be the predominant speed according to 75 percent of respondents by the end of 2018. What is more surprising is that 100G will also be the predominant speed in metro and access networks, with 71 percent and 58 percent respectively.

Because carriers are depending on SDN and NFV to reverse the tide of growing costs and flat revenues, this adds a new sense of urgency to their already time-crunched virtualization efforts. The issue is that the performance of virtualized solutions today struggle to contend with 10G speeds. 100G means 10 times more data delivered 10 times faster with 10 times less time to react. Can the current performance trajectory deliver this kind of improvement by 2018?

• Q: So, providers know they need to virtualize quickly, though as you said, there’s a new level of complexity. What can be done?

A: Physical appliances supporting 100G are only now being developed and deployed. The challenge for 2018 is to successfully virtualize these physical appliance solutions and still maintain the same performance and reliability. Fortunately, the vast majority of appliances are already based on the same standard server platforms forming the infrastructure basis for NFV, and 100G appliances are no exception. The issue is ensuring that the right data input/output capacity is available to handle 100G speeds and data volumes when making the transition to NFV infrastructures.

Hybrid infrastructures with a combination of physical and virtual appliances are a potential short-term solution, but the real benefits of virtualization will not be fully realized until appliances are fully virtualized. This will require a rethink of currently accepted SDN and NFV reference hardware implementations, but this is not a technical challenge, as the technology exists. The motivation is the impending deluge of data that 100G will produce and with which SDN and NFV will have to contend.

• Q: Finally, what about the security angle?

A: Two of the application areas most affected by these changes are network management and security. These applications need to analyze each and every packet in the network to determine if the network is performing as expected and that there is no unusual behavior. The survey showed that network and security appliances are already widely deployed and that the most mature applications, such as network and performance monitoring, firewalls and intrusion prevention systems, have already been virtualized by about a third of respondents. The top three technical challenges concerning carriers in the survey were security, throughput and latency, which is not surprising considering the 100G tsunami that is about to hit.

To download the complete report, visit http://www.napatech.com/about/resources/future-of-network-appliances.

Daniel Joseph Barry is VP Positioning and Chief Evangelist at Napatech and has over 20 years experience in the IT and Telecom industry. Prior to joining Napatech in 2009, Dan Joe was Marketing Director at TPACK, a leading supplier of transport chip solutions to the Telecom sector.  From 2001 to 2005, he was Director of Sales and Business Development at optical component vendor NKT Integration (now Ignis Photonyx) following various positions in product development, business development and product management at Ericsson. Dan Joe joined Ericsson in 1995 from a position in the R&D department of Jutland Telecom (now TDC). He has an MBA and a BSc degree in Electronic Engineering from Trinity College Dublin.