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One of the most popular buzzwords in the IT sector in the past few years has been 'software-defined'. This is a strategy that's crept into many parts of enterprise IT strategies, and networking is no exception.
Software-defined infrastructure has now become a key part of how modern data centres are designed and managed, as it offers professionals a greater degree of flexibility to help cope with the ever-changing needs of today's systems and applications.
Data Center Dynamics recently noted that today's solutions are more distributed and dynamic in nature, as well as having greater interconnectivity. This means that applications are frequently dependent upon an array of other services and resources in order to function properly, which will place a heavy burden on a network's underlying infrastructure.
Under traditional approaches to data centre management, adapting a network to respond to changing demands would be a difficult, time-consuming process that would require engineers to go into a data centre and physically reconfigure infrastructure.
But this may no longer be practical for situations where a company needs to act more quickly, which is where automation in the form of software-defined networking comes in. In order to be successful moving forward, Data Center Dynamics noted that infrastructure must be capable of being reconfigured remotely via software.
Software-defined can often mean different things to different people, and the principle covers a wide range of IT solutions. But when it comes to networking, it typically covers a number of different approaches that are intended to make the network infrastructure more dynamic and easy to configure as required, the publication said.
"One approach is to separate the control plane, or management part of the network, from the forwarding plane, typically the switch hardware that actually routes packets around the network," it explained.
This aims to centralise control over network traffic. To achieve this, managers should consider the deployment of tools such as OpenFlow, which is a protocol designed to provide a standard mechanism for this and is supported by many switch vendors, including Dell, HPE, and Cisco.
Alternatively, professionals can look to virtualise the network. This allows for the creation of logical networks that use the physical infrastructure and cables to move data around, but which do not always have the same IP address scheme and may provide differences in quality of service and security policies dependent on the specific needs at any given time.
A virtual network means that companies can create new connections without having to physically reroute cables, but it can also enable greater oversight of network traffic, since the switching and routing capability is integrated into the hypervisor and distributed throughout the infrastructure.
Data Center Dynamics noted that software-defined networking is just one strand of a complete solution, which should include storage and compute processes. These solutions are highly interdependent and the ultimate aim for professionals would be to pull them all together to create a complete software-defined data centre (SDCC).
"With SDDC, the entire data centre infrastructure should be configurable under software control, making it easier to automate so that IT staff can devote less time to simply keeping the lights on," the publication stated.
