CenturyLink: Slow Movement to Software-Defined Wide-Area Networks (SD-WANs)
Customer transitions to software-defined wide-area network technology are taking longer than expected, according to CenturyLink, as networks are being upgraded on a piecemeal basis, not all at once. This is no surprise to this author, who has pounded the table that SD-WANs would be deployed very slowly because existing networking infrastructure could not easily be replaced and lack of a complete set of standards inhibited multi vendor interoperability.
“What we didn’t understand is most customers are themselves multi-tenant,” CenturyLink’s Eric Nowak said during a SD-WAN panel organized by Light Reading.
When CenturyLink deployed its SD-WAN service at the beginning of the year, it had expectations on how customers would view the importance of cost savings, the role SD-WAN would play on customer networks and more. All those expectations were subverted by reality. CenturyLink expected customers to be interested in getting cost savings from SD-WAN. In reality, customers weren’t so much looking to save money as get more for the same spending, Nowak said. SD-WAN can provide five to ten times the bandwidth as conventional WAN with the same security and application performance, for the same money, he said.
CenturyLink thought its customers would transition their entire networks to SD-WAN. In reality, the transition is taking time, with new locations going on the new network and traditional connections remaining in place, Nowak said.
Again, no surpise to us, as we totally rejected Prof. Guru Paraulker’s ONS assertions/ demands that classical SDN (as defined by Open Network Foundation) must start with a clean slate and deploy all new equipment (centralized SDN Controller for the Control plane, with L2/L3 data forwarding engines for the Data Plane). Overlay networks (that overlay SDN on the existing network infrastructure) were excluded and referred to as “SDN washing” – along with all the network vendor proprietary schemes that claimed to be “SDN compatible.”
“What we didn’t understand is most customers are themselves multi-tenant,” Nowak said. They have franchises, divisions and their own customers, all of which need to be managed independently.
“We as a service provider have customers with their own end customers,” Nowak said. “We sell to customers that have their own end customers downstream.” SD-WAN needs to be tuned to allow Skype for Business and other applications to work, and that ability — and need — to customize “may be one of the things that limits adoption,” Nowak added.
CenturyLink not only uses multi-tenant capabilities internally, but it also delivers those capabilities as a service to help customers manage their own customers. CenturyLink learned a lot from its first 50 customers. “Those are a lot of lessons in a short amount of time,” said Heavy Reading Senior Analyst Sterling Perrin, who moderated the panel.
Service providers need to “co-opt” SD-WAN into their own offerings, rather than simply reselling SD-WAN “off a catalog,” Andrew Coward, vice president of strategy at Brocade Communications Systems Inc.said. Simply reselling SD-WAN is a race to the bottom, as enterprises will group together circuits from multiple providers and go with the one that offers the best price performance, a pattern Perrin tagged “MPLS arbitrage.” In that case, customers benefit by saving money, vendors benefit, but service providers lose out on revenue, Mr. Perrin said. Service providers can avoid this fate by combining SD-WAN into a suite of vCPE and other services (what might those be?).
Read more at:
References from CenturyLink:
http://www.centurylink.com/business/enterprise/services/data-network/sd-wan.html
http://news.centurylink.com/news/centurylink-unveils-fully-managed-sd-wan-service
http://www.centurylink.com/asset/business/enterprise/data-sheet/sd-wan-sellsheet-ss160184.pdf
Related posts:
- IHS Markit: 75% of Carriers Surveyed Have Deployed or Will Deploy SDN This Year
- HOTi Summary Part II. SDN & NFV Impact on Interconnects & Cloud Orchestration Lacking
- IDC Forecasts Strong Growth for Software-Defined WAN As Enterprises Seek to Optimize Their Cloud Strategies
- Level 3: Focus SDN/NFV on Enterprise Issues
- Heavy Reading: Faster Services Driving NFV
- Heavy Reading: SDN Bringing Capex, Opex Savings to Optical Networks
- Masergy Promises Differentiated SD-WAN
IHS Markit SD-WAN Webcast Presentation Slides:
Author’s Note:
On this webcast, Telstra (Australia) was said to be the first carrier to deploy SDN in the WAN. Windstream said that we are in an early “journey” to SDN WAN. AT&Ts Network on Demand was cited as being a SDN WAN, but it’s actually only confined to the Management Plane for provisioning & reconfiguration which the Open Network Foundation (creators of Open Flow “southbound API”) doesn’t address let alone specify.
AT&T’s Network on Demand offers customer automated provisioning and rate changes for a switched Ethernet WAN. I was told that it used NETCONF and YANG modeling language for configuration/provisioning, along with some form of network orchestration software (possibly from TAIL-f/Cisco).
Copy/paste from AT&T’s website referenced above:
AT&T Network on Demand is the first of its kind software-defined networking solution in the U.S. It makes network management easier than ever with an online self-service portal. Business customers can now easily add or change services, scale bandwidth to meet their changing needs and manage their network all in near real time. This translates into time savings and less complexity for companies of all sizes.
“We’re working with Cisco to bring the next-generation network technology benefits to our customers. Cisco is an industry leader in networking. Their extensive SDN and NFV capabilities will broaden and enhance our Network on Demand platform,” Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO, AT&T Mobile and Business Solutions.
We’re continuing to make our network dynamic and adaptive with these new Network on Demand capabilities. This will enable the agility, speed and efficiency customers need.