New revenue avenues, security, better offerings to drive SDN: Brocade India Systems Engineering, Director

By Krishna Mukherjee

Network performance combined with security-related attacks and breaches continue to impede delivery of services and create additional challenges to network and service reliability. Brocade is addressing these problems with its comprehensive and open SDN architecture.

Swapna Bapat, Director of Systems Engineering, Brocade India, speaks to Voice&Data on how SDN is key to modernizing today’s networks, and why customers' perspectives on SDN are changing.

Voice&Data: Tell us something about your journey...

Swapna Bapat: I started my career as a software developer probably like many engineers out there, but then I realized that I am more of people’s person so joined product management.

Product management allows you to have a very nice balance of technology as well as business because you determine what the company should do, how it should be priced etc.So, I was involved in making some very specialized products for India and in some cases, using the local talent pool as well in the sense the local start-ups.

And that is the exciting thing about Brocade because with its open architecture, literally anyone can come and develop an app.

Voice&Data: Network performance combined with security-related attacks and breaches continue to impede delivery of services and create additional challenges to network and service reliability. How do you think Brocade Flow Optimizer will address the real-time network performance challenges?

Swapna Bapat: Brocade Flow optimiser is an app which has been developed to proactively detect volumetric attacks on the network to keep a continuous view on what is happening on the network using S Flow Analyser, which is again a standard analyzer and this is not actually monitoring but doing things without any human involvement that is the key when it comes to SDN and as a result, it helps the service provider as well.

The bandwidth loss that occurs per day for a service provider if it was occupied by say 20 gig bandwidth attack it roughly runs into 100 and 1,000 of dollars, industry estimates say it’s roughly 3,50,000 dollars a day.

Imagine if you are not able to detect that from where it has come, suddenly your network has slowed down, by the time you will realize it you will already have suffered revenue loss and reputational loss, you might also suffer customer loss.

So instead of that, if pre-program your network to ward off volumetric attacks of this sort and drop that traffic completely without any human involvement, you save face, and as a result, by doing this, you save your customers and the revenue loss.

Voice&Data: But how does it actually work?

Swapna Bapat: Suppose, there’s a network which has an SDN controller sitting on top of it. Now, on top of the SDN controller, Brocade has developed a product called Brocade Flow Optimizer now this application is reading what is happening in the network proactively, so it would detect any problem of huge source.

Malicious traffic occupies huge bandwidth and as a result, other applications not get the adequate bandwidth but with Brocade Flow Optimizer we are monitoring the network, what type of traffic is there in the network and is there any anomalous traffic, which is unexpected huge flow of traffic from a set of IP addresses.

Our experience says, that over the weekends most CSPs (cloud service provider) receive attacks, so what we are doing we are blocking the traffic whenever we are detecting some malicious attacks.

Voice&Data: What type of traction could be seen around IoT these days?

Swapna Bapat: Mobile network operators are under a lot of stress these days as a lot of investment goes into spectrum and their ARPUs are also declining.

In such a scenario, a great avenue for generating avenues could be IoT. While operators are struggling with the fact that how do I make this IoT solutions, what do I need and I am investing so much money in spectrum, in my base stations, backhaul network, what is my RoI?

What Brocade can change for service providers is bringing their cost to implement IoT to one tenth of the current cost. The way we can do this is by virtualizing the packet core, which is the part of the mobile network, which does charging which does session management, and that today runs into multiple million dollars.

It is a huge saving as it is a software and you can deploy it very near to the applications. I don’t have to deploy in a very fancy data center, I can put is in micro data center.

Micro data center is another concept which is very scaled down data center, very low-cost data center and close to the base stations.

What you save is the backhaul cost to the micro data center, save on packet core itself, you are actually bringing it to smaller locations very close to the base stations. So deploying something like IoT for example, detecting oxygen level in coal mines this can be relate over a cellular network and can be detected close to the mine itself and you can offer this as a service to the utility company.

It is a whole new way to generate revenues for mobile operators and this we will see gaining a lot of momentum in the next few months as we start engaging.

The biggest advantage in software based packet core is the fact every individual in the packet core can individually scale up.

Packet core has three components and each of these components can be individually grown and how is that relevant to mobile subscribe? When we started off, we started off with voice. Voice is very less to carry and then we started moving to data, suddenly there was huge amount of data going into network, which means operators have to buy more hardware, scale more expense for them, but as a software company we scale that down to just as the amount of servers.

Voice&Data: Where do you see the SDN market five years down the line?

Swapna Bapat: Five years down the line, we would definitely see much more SDN adoption in enterprise, whether it is in banks or government or ITES, which is a very exclusive industry for India but technologically more advanced.

The key needs for SDN would be new revenue generating opportunities more and more you will see these enterprises adopting SDN to explore new revenue generating opportunities. Second is security, for security the classic example is what Brocade Flow Optimizer does, it is pre-advanced, mitigation of issues that is going to be the second reason for adopting. Today what happens, the firewall is different, the security wall is different. If something is detected by the firewall then going and applying to the network, these simple things are not happening.

SDN can make all these happen. So, in a nutshell, new revenue opportunities, security and better offerings would actually drive SDN in the near future.