Network core to wider applications… SDN is gaining steady momentum: Edgar Dias, Brocade

By Nandita Singh

 Brocade is extending its leadership in India market in emerging technologies for cloud, social, mobile and big data. Edgar Dias, Senior Regional Director for Brocade India & SAARC shares his thoughts on how the recent acquisition of Connectem add up along with Vyatta, Vistapointe, and SteelApp virtual ADC product line from Riverbed. And how well Brocade is poised to leverage its competencies to drive efficiencies across datacenters in India.

 What opportunities Brocade is leveraging in the India market? Please elaborate on your customer mix as well.

According to Gartner, the Indian data center infrastructure market, comprising server, storage and networking equipment, will reach $2.03 billion in 2015 - making India the second largest market for data center infrastructure and the second fastest growing market in Asia Pacific. The India market is going through a dramatic transformation with investments in private cloud, public cloud as well as network refresh due to the 10G and 40G adoption across Enterprise, Government and other verticals. Strong fundamentals in the India market – optimistic and growing economy, rollout of 4G/LTE, growing adoption of smart devices, enterprise growth, Government’s push with ‘Digital India’ and ‘Smart Cities’ all point to the need for next-gen network technologies (The New IP).

The significant network demands this imposes, offers opportunities for Brocade’s next generation of New IP products to meet this challenge. It transforms the service provider network to help with increasing network costs due to the ever-expanding rise in network traffic and connected devices. The New IP is open with a purpose and is ecosystem driving, enabling service providers to quickly innovate and deliver new high-margin services to their customers. Service providers, education, government and enterprise customers of all sizes can all benefit from the New IP.

Brocade plays beautifully in the sweet spot of this demand through its industry leading SAN, Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabric solutions for data centers. We have also started to see some great results in India – we are targeting to grow 4x the market growth rate in India and have won a total of 100+ New IP wins in India over the last 18-24 months.

What according to you is driving the emerging ‘third network’ characterized by agility and orchestration?

The ‘Third Network’ vision by MEF (Metro Ethernet Forum) is all about building agility, assurance and orchestration into the network. The vision points to the importance of software-definition and virtualization as enablers of new services.

Key Business Drivers for the ‘Third Network’ include:

• On-demand Services: With the continued rapid growth of cloud services as a new revenue source for communications service providers, network connectivity services must also evolve to align with cloud services’ short service activation times and variable service durations.
• Expectation for Quality: Regardless of where or how end users are connected to the network, they expect consistent quality. Users expect the performance of their apps in the remote cloud to behave as they do when running locally on their LAN. Therefore, the quality of the network connectivity service must align with the needs of the applications and their users.
• Evolution of Telecom Networks and Services: As we move to an even more dynamically connected cloud-centric future, many devices, e.g., connected cars, smartwatches, smartphones, tablets, phablets, and sensors, will connect and communicate to further enhance our lives. The underlying network must transform to facilitate cloud service delivery and mobile services that connect people and devices in real-time, on-demand, with an assured quality of experience. This transformation leverages Carrier Ethernet with APIs developed by the MEF to enable internet-style agility. These APIs enable Lifecycle Service Orchestration of existing networks, SDN, NFV for more programmatic control over the network.

What kind of SDN/ NFV adoption you are witnessing in the market?

According to the 2014 Gartner report, ‘Predicts 2015: Enterprise Networking and Network Services’ - 75% of data center professionals are expected to adopt Software Defined Networks (SDN) within the next five years.

Customers know that SDN is relevant and want to be prepared for the New IP. Their priority is building a network infrastructure that meets their needs today that can meet rapidly growing demands for wireless access, video, VDI and other network services that are taxing their legacy networks.

The market is swinging towards SDN and Brocade is leading the charge with all solutions getting more and more software driven. In fact we are interested in working with partners who have skills of selling software as well.

Over the past 12 months, we’ve seen numerous design wins across sectors with next-generation architecture deployments around SDN and NFV. Brocade is also currently automating IT workflows within IT/ITes leveraging its SDN capabilities.

As an early supporter of SDN initiatives such as OpenFlow and OpenDaylight, Brocade believes that true and rapid innovation can only be found in the open-sourced community. Through this belief, Brocade is helping organizations realize the promise and benefits of open SDN with protection of investment and without the fear of vendor lock-in.

What are the trends in converged network play in India? How is Brocade leveraging on it?

What started as a niche market a few years ago has blossomed into a multi-billion dollar business with many of technology’s biggest players involved in it. EMC, Dell and VMware are making big moves in this to solidify their position in the fast-growing converged infrastructure market.

The shift towards converged networks has been enabled by the growth of software-defined networking. SDN is gaining steady momentum and we are witnessing a shift in its applications from the network core to wider applications. Telecom operators now understand the benefits of SDN and how it can help them reshape their business models.

In June, this year, Brocade partnered with Sugon, one of the leading high-performance computing vendors in China to incorporate Brocade’s VCS Fabric technology with Sugon’s data center solutions, specifically for the Chinese market. The partnership aims to bring new converged networking innovations to China and address the growing demand for software networking solutions in China while helping both companies gain market share.

“Open is our core strategy and differentiates us from the rest. We are a strong proponent of Openstack and OpenDaylight. As a founding platinum member of OpenDaylight, we’re completely committed to empowering the developer ecosystem to deliver an open source framework and platform for SDN. The Brocade SDN Controller is the first commercial controller built directly from OpenDaylight code, without any proprietary extensions or platform dependencies. “

What focused offering has the company got for telcos?

We acquired Connectem, a privately-held company in the LTE virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) market in March 2015. Connectem extends Brocade’s New IP leadership to mobile networks to enable enterprises and service providers to offer ubiquitous connectivity between mobile and IoT devices, data centers, as well as public and private clouds.

Through integrating Connectem’s virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), and Vistapointe’s visibility and analytics solutions, with Brocade’s software and hardware networking portfolios, we are able to offer a platform for end-to-end mobile networking and network visibility, which truly creates an industry-leading New IP data center infrastructure to help enterprises and service providers address the IoT requirements. We recently also unveiled our mobile networking innovations at Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2015, including Brocade Virtual Core for Mobile (VCM), Brocade Smart Packet Broker, Brocade Packet Probe and Brocade Mobile Analytics.

On October 21, 2015, Brocade announced new Network Visibility solutions that transform the mobile operator visibility infrastructure to unlock new levels of agility and choice. The software-driven approach also delivers real-time programmability of the packet brokers, and a dynamic, scale-out architecture that supports an unprecedented 100 million subscribers per packet core.

Please elaborate on how these help telecom operators in driving their communications business.

Mobile network operators are under significant pressure as the declining Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) derived from voice services is not being sufficiently offset by the ARPU growth from mobile data. At the same time, customer adoption of Over-The-Top (OTT) services—such as video—is exploding, requiring even more network capacity and performance. This trend is driving the build-out of 4G/LTE networks and early planning for the upcoming deployment of 5G. In these transitions, mobile operators are increasingly relying on visibility and analytics to both control costs and enable new premium services and revenue streams. Unfortunately, traditional visibility infrastructures were not designed to support the latest generation of mobile networks.

Brocade’s innovative approach to building an open, software-enabled visibility infrastructure addresses this key challenge with Brocade’s Network Visibility solutions. These solutions empower mobile network operators with critical insights into the traffic within their networks, while also transitioning their visibility infrastructures from being closed and monolithic to software-enabled, open, and disaggregated. With an open and software-centric architecture—cornerstones of the New IP—Brocade is redefining visibility infrastructures found in mobile packet cores today, enabling mobile operators to accelerate their journey to an agile infrastructure that can support the explosive data growth and capacity demands of 4G/LTE and future 5G mobile networks.

What’s unique about the offerings for telecoms? How is Brocade different from competition in this respect?

One of the trends driving growth of the networking industry is demand for open standards by customers. Open is our core strategy and differentiates us from the rest. We are a strong proponent of Openstack and OpenDaylight. As a founding platinum member of OpenDaylight, we’re completely committed to empowering the developer ecosystem to deliver an open source framework and platform for SDN. The Brocade SDN Controller is the first commercial controller built directly from OpenDaylight code, without any proprietary extensions or platform dependencies. Globally, AT&T has also partnered with Brocade for their Domain 2.0 supplier program to help build out AT&T’s next-generation network.

We also use a targeted approach to the market. We know which industries and niches to target and strategically work with our partners to initiate conversations. This zooming in strategy helps us maximize our sales conversion rates and gives us a leg up on the competition. Further, Brocade is strengthening its position in the networking industry through strategic investments as well, as the adoption of software-centric networking continues to accelerate. Brocade is focused on investing strategically in New IP across NFV and SDN to provide seamless data center and cloud solutions.

Our recent acquisition of Connectem is a key component of Brocade's transformative investment strategy, complementing the acquisitions of Vyatta, Vistapointe, and SteelApp virtual ADC product line from Riverbed. Going forward, we expect to make additional strategic investments that extend our leadership in emerging technologies for cloud, social, mobile and big data.

Also Read: Top Technology Trends in Networking in 2016