We’ve all fallen into the trap of telling folks what something is and assuming they can make the connection about why they should care. Technology is no exception. Telecommunications service providers are very adept at using what I call the “acronym alphabet soup.” These terms are useful and necessary to describe a vast array of technologies; however, marketers too often adopt this technical jargon, using these terms as benefits in-and-of themselves.
This approach assumes our audience understands how technologies work and that they can intuitively make the connection between them and the business challenges they solve. Unfortunately, making those connections requires some expertise in the specialized telecommunications networking domain—an expertise not possessed—or needed—by most of the audience that could benefit from it.
From technobabble to results
Networks are evolving and service providers are adopting virtualization, orchestration, software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV)—among other alphabet soup acronyms—to abstract network elements, automate network transactions and accelerate innovation and growth. Unfortunately, this terminology bandied-about as proof points that the technology is valuable, sounds like technobabble to business and IT leaders.
We often fail to mention how the self-service, visibility and control these technologies offer empower businesses to deliver a better customer experience and better bottom‑line results. These include things like:
Controlling network elements
Windstream Enterprise has gone all-in on SDN, VNF and software and network element disaggregation to empower us to orchestrate control of disparate network elements–what we call our Cloud Core Network Architecture. However, that’s not the story. As an engineer, I geek-out about how this technology works, but ultimately the reason we do it is because it empowers you, our customers, to deliver a better customer experience.
Interested in learning more? Join Windstream Enterprise, Accedian and Heavy Reading for an informative webinar, “From static to programmable: Leveraging the next wave of virtualization to deliver secure end-to-end applications.”
Tuesday, October 15, 20191:00 pm ET | 12:00 pm CT | 11:00 am MT | 10:00 am PTRegister now
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When the expressway ahead becomes gridlocked, do you accept the frustration of stop-and-go traffic? Or, do you take the next exit and dynamically navigate an alternate path to your desired destination? If you’re the latter kind of driver, you’ll want to keep reading.
Every day, more enterprise-critical infrastructure, applications and data live “in the cloud.” As users and operators shift attention to digital destinations, it’s tempting to ignore the physical paths that enable those connections. In a software-defined network, does the physical network still matter?
Like the roads between your home and office matter to you, the physical network that connects customers to the virtual world matters more than ever. In fact, the customer experience—for enterprise users and their customers—is directly impacted by the physical path that runs between users and the cloud-based content they need. Customer experience is largely defined by the performance of the primary network path, but it may be significantly impacted by the capabilities and expertise of the network service provider when the primary path suddenly becomes inaccessible.
When considering your wide-area network (WAN), it’s often the network segment closest to the customer that remains the weakest link in the chain. Delivering a superior experience, by getting “close to a customer,” is challenging when network capacity and/or performance management are inhibitors rather than enablers. Whether driving collaboration across a distributed workforce or securely processing e‑commerce transactions, reliable end-to-end connectivity is essential.
Beyond reliability, network performance becomes critical to ensuring a seamless end‑user experience—that’s true for internal customers relying on unified communications as a service (UCaaS) or enterprise resource planning systems and external customers streaming video, music and other latency-intolerant content. SD‑WAN can help alleviate some network shortcomings by routing traffic around the roadblocks, but ultimately the performance and reliability of the underlying physical network play an important role and will continue to matter.
When it comes to reliability, software-defined networking (SDN) is often combined with diverse infrastructure to automatically and instantly fail-over in response to an isolated outage or impairment within the core of a WAN. Having a provider that manages their own nationwide transport network to ensure optimal routing is a key aspect of delivering a great network experience.
When it comes to the last mile, it is often impractical and uneconomical for a single service provider to build out their own redundant facilities that connect to all the enterprise’s locations. For this vital component of the network, it is important to find a provider who has deep inter-connectivity with other providers with the ability to solve for the ‘last mile’ with the broadest set of options available (including its own metro fiber networks and on-net buildings including data centers that host cloud services). After all, the more options your routing software can leverage (be they fiber, copper, cable, cellular or fixed wireless), the less likely a circuit outage is to impact the user experience.
If your SD-WAN provider is relying only on public internet connections and only delivering an overlay for your WAN connectivity, they have no direct control over what happens when routing traffic that supports critical applications. Eliminating as many service provider hand-offs as possible greatly improves network manageability, performance, customer experience and cost. Ideally, one provider will meet all your connectivity needs and provide more modern ways to manage your network and applications via a “single pane of glass” that yields more efficient operations—whether you opt for a fully-managed solution or do-it-yourself.
Enterprises can benefit greatly from having end-to-end connections with a single network service provider. Like a seasoned cabbie in a city unfamiliar to you, leveraging the network of the right provider will get you where want to go, even when your usual route is blocked.
Digital applications have become a critical component of a business’s image and reputation. As more customers interact with online systems, application outages or impairments are more than just a black eye—missed opportunities, abandoned shopping carts and customer attrition all have a direct negative impact on the bottom line.
Once upon a time, MPLS-based networks were innovative solutions that enabled progress in an emerging digital world. Nearly a quarter century later, that same technology has been deemed “legacy” because it has become an inhibitor to future success. Limitations may include bandwidth restrictions, costly access, limited visibility and a lack of redundancy. Fundamentally, MPLS-based WANs of yore were designed to support a handful of critical enterprise applications that were tethered to dependent data in a corporate data center. MPLS-based WANs are not optimized for a cloud-based world in which customer experience is defined by the voracious consumption of big data via small apps, anywhere, anytime, on any device.
The WAN is the critical resource to deliver an experience that external customers expect and that internal users demand. Top five concerns from a recent IDG “State of the CIO” survey included three initiatives that can be either directly enabled—or inhibited—by the capabilities of the WAN:
Modernizing legacy systems
Virtualizing an ecosystem with software-defined infrastructure enables assets to be pooled and optimized. Automatic load balancing ensures that traffic flows and workloads are dynamically and appropriately prioritized to continuously meet high expectations for the customer experience. No one will notice a few seconds of delay in an hours-long process for generating monthly invoices; everyone will notice any delay in completing a transaction in a familiar app. An SD-WAN simply performs well in ways that were never even envisioned for MPLS-based networks.
Migrating apps to the cloud
By 2020, 83% of workloads will be run in the cloud, according to LogicMonitor’s “Cloud Vision 2020: The Future of the Cloud Study.” As customers and users continue to become more geographically dispersed in relation to the applications and data that are required to create their experience, the availability and performance of the WAN only becomes more critical. Without a WAN designed for a digital world, a poor customer experience will fail to win new customers and will drive existing customers to competitors.
Enhancing security
Unfortunately, the digital world can be a dangerous one. Nearly 20% of all security breaches begin with a network intrusion, according to IBM’s recent “X-Force Threat Intelligence” study. Securing data at rest and in transit is essential, especially personally identifiable information (PII). The inherent complexity of legacy WANs makes them both challenging and costly to manage securely.
SD-WAN: A flexible solution for an inflexible world
Legacy infrastructure is deeply embedded. Customer experience expectations are high. Security threats are multiplying. In the face of these unyielding constraints, SD-WAN provides a peaceful path for an evolution—as opposed to a painful revolution.
Fortunately, an SD-WAN can often be deployed “over the top” of existing infrastructure. Abstracting hardware and network resources as software “components,” via software‑defined networking, can add flexibility and manageability, while maximizing the ROI on existing assets. There is no need for a “big bang” rip-and-replace project. SD‑WAN can be added to an existing ecosystem, on a site-by-site basis and with no service interruptions, all at a pace that makes sense in terms of both the financial and human resources available.
SD-WAN can help support better application performance and enhance your customer experience. Wherever your organization may be with modernizing your WAN, Windstream Enterprise can help guide you in the right direction. To learn more about successfully transforming your application availability and performance, check out this whitepaper: Support successful business transformation with application availability and performance.
I enjoy my job immensely. Having the responsibility to evaluate new technologies for introduction into our network at a time when the pace of change is unprecedented and only accelerating, ensures I’m constantly exposed to new and often amazing innovations. As a self-anointed ‘infophile’, I thoroughly appreciate diving deep into the inner-workings of how technologies function and exploring how best to incorporate them into our world-class network and services. I’m thankfully surrounded by many truly brilliant engineers here at Windstream Enterprise with a similar affliction.
But, here’s the thing, as a telco/ISP industry, we have grossly failed the overwhelming majority of those we serve by extending our love for what should remain esoteric protocols, standards, and componentry into how we expose our products and services. In many cases, there are legitimate reasons why the industry has gone down this path.
Making networks accessible
For one, the path often requires massive investment to keep up with the never-ending arms races amongst carriers. Shifting from a 4G network to a 5G-enabled network is a good example. Publicly highlighting the underlying technological investment conveys performance improvement—or at least the perception of performance improvement. This goes far beyond a marketing discussion however. It’s more about how customers interact with services to achieve their desired outcomes and experiences. At Windstream Enterprise, we focus on delivering the best customer experience and keeping that experience as straightforward and intuitive as possible. A big part of this focus is enabled by to our aggressive pivot toward programmable networks (PN). The chief mission of our PN strategy is to make networks accessible. Achieving this vision requires abstracting the complexity of networking and enabling our customers to focus on what matters to them: their content and experience.
Determining software defined
In my experience, it generally takes a deep mastery of complex subjects to describe it in layman’s terms. Don’t believe me? Try teaching physics to a kindergartner. We’re squarely in the age of ‘software-defined everything’, which often carries the promise of simplified, accessible networking. I believe much of the IT industry recognizes the many software-defined platforms and solutions are anything but simple. There are many criteria one might apply to determine how software-defined something is:
Can it be virtualized easily?
Is it “cloud native”?
Is the control plane separated from the data plane?
Are there robust and open APIs for consumption?
I would submit that software-defined in the context of managed services should be synonymous with simplified and accessible. If otherwise, question it heavily.
Historical network deployment vs. a programmable network deployment
Moving beyond the somewhat abstract and buzz-word laden view, perhaps it’s helpful to take a common deployment example and unpack how it might look in a historic approach and a programmable network solution. Let’s take the fictitious nationwide retailer Acme Tires Inc. Acme leverages proprietary point-of-sale and inventory software hosted in their private data center. They’re no strangers to network blips and have determined that every minute that a retail store loses connectivity for this application equates to $5,000 in lost revenue. So, it’s vital this app maintain high availability. It’s also requisite that the connectivity be highly secure as it’s handling credit card transactions.
What’s that look like historically? (brace yourself for the techno-jargon that follows)
Likely an MPLS connection at each store where the point-of-sale traffic is marked with the appropriate DCSP values of AF21 or AF22 applied from the LAN interface of a router segmenting by 802.1q VLAN then traversing a private MPLS VRF and leveraging eBGP peering to advertise link state on a CIDR block-level to enable failover of the data center between redundant UNIs. The data center probably leverages VRRP for a redundant hardware deployment as it’s aggregating multiple sites. I could go on and on, but you get the point; lots of complex protocols that need to be setup precisely to ensure expected performance. Otherwise, the assistant store manager’s tendency to play Fortnite from her cell phone may cause credit card transactions to take minutes to complete or customer phone calls to be choppy.
Once established and all the bugs are worked out, maybe the setup works well to the extent everything remains static. But how many business or home networks remain static for long these days? What happens when corporate headquarters decides to shift from the proprietary CRM running in the data center and adopt Salesforce in the cloud? How does the new network admin who wasn’t around for the initial access‑control‑list based policies go about figuring out the appropriate changes to ensure things continue to work smoothly in the new setup? How do they know how much traffic the current setup is generating or the baseline performance? You’re probably beginning to get a sense of the strain and challenges the traditional MPLS L3VPN model suffers as more and more shifts to cloud.
How does that look different in a programmable network solution?
For starters, rather than being provided a complex mapping of DIFFERV to MPLS EXP values and associate queue handling, perhaps the IT administrator is provided with a few questions via an intuitive interface to guide them through setting up security and prioritization policies of what’s most important to their business.
Prioritizing the customer experience
Maybe as a business owner or IT administrator, you’re given a few questions or an intuitive user interface to guide you through setting up the policy of what’s most important to your business. Is Salesforce the absolute most critical application for you? Click the radio button and the programmable network takes the complexity out of treating that traffic in a secure and prioritized manner. Programmable networking doesn’t end at application-level prioritization though. It extends to ensuring higher reliability, greater visibility, simplified connectivity between sites and the cloud, and intuitive self-service capabilities.
The bottom line is, technology that only serves to further complicate our lives should never be embraced. That’s why approaching solutions from the customer’s experience first and continuing to bring to market world-class solutions that our customers love is our priority here at Windstream Enterprise. And, with a little discipline from geeks like myself, truly simplifying the experience without all the technojargon that no one should ever have to care about.
Like so many buzzwords, SDN (software-defined networking) has been abused, perhaps that’s why several companies have been hiding it1, and aspects of SDN are taking on new names such as network automation and intent-based networking—and, of course, SD-WAN (for SDN at the edge). Whatever you call it, SDN is based on the deceivingly simple principle of decoupling network control and forwarding functions, increasing network agility in many ways:
Reaping the benefits of SDN
These benefits of SDN impact all facets of networking. It’s made its mark in the world of content delivery, making content delivery networks elastic and able to support bandwidth bursting through pre-determined policies rather than guessing how much bandwidth is needed in advance of high-traffic viewing. As over-the-top (OTT), on‑demand content continues to rise in popularity, software-defined networking allows content providers to save on both CAPEX and OPEX investments. Of course, the potential applications for SDN go well beyond CDN.
Service providers have been implementing SDN, although a lot of the work done to date falls under the “un-sexy” category. Reaping the benefits of SDN requires a great deal of foundational work. You need a real-time understanding of what network resources are available and their relationships. You must be able to configure disparate equipment across multiple domains through an abstracted software layer. You must also automate provisioning workflows and processes. This foundational work is needed to enable flexible and controllable “sexy” products.
The Windstream Wholesale advantage
At Windstream Wholesale, we’ve combined SDN with complementary technologies (network function virtualization and programmable network), overlaid on our nationwide fiber backbone to create our Cloud CoreTM network architecture which is the foundation for our portfolio of networking services. With this approach, we’ve improved the speed to provision and deploy necessary high-capacity connections such as wavelengths for content providers that constantly need additional bandwidth and unique routing to improve the delivery of high-definition content to end-users.
Today, content providers can benefit from Windstream Wholesale’s ultra-fast provisioning of wavelengths up to 100 Gbps via our Cloud Core network architecture and diverse routes connecting PoPs in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets to most popular Tier 1 PoPs, carrier hotels and data centers, bringing content closer to their end-users and improving the overall content experience.
Gone are the days of pre-provisioning physical hardware well in advance of hard‑to‑anticipate events in an attempt to keep up with the public’s insatiable appetite for on‑demand content. SDN has enabled a clearer path for all the supporting elements of content delivery. And, with the foundation laid, the future possibilities seem limitless.
1 https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/analysis/from-sdn-washing-to-sdn-hiding/2018/11/
If you’ve had a relationship with Windstream Enterprise in the past, it may surprise you how much we’ve changed. We’ve always had a strong focus on our customers and a top-to-bottom sense of responsibility to provide the best experience in the industry. But historically, I wouldn’t have characterized us as a technology leader in our space. That’s changed in a big way. Over the past few years we’ve been hard at work on evolving our network infrastructure. Going forward, we’re differentiating not only by our support, but also by our level of innovation and application of technologies from both in and outside of the traditional telecom space. Much of which culminates in the development of our Cloud Core Network architecture.
What do we mean by Cloud Core Network? Let’s parse the phrase a bit to get a better sense for what it represents.
Everything today starts with the cloud
The word cloud seems omnipresent these days and is applied to so many aspects of life, it’s sometimes hard to put a single definition to it. My own earliest recollections involve depictions of network devices ( routers, switches, computers) portrayed as a cloud as a means of shorthand rather than drawing out a blur of devices connected in a mesh fashion.
This became a common technique for visualizing the Internet and ultimately grew to be more closely associated with centralized compute/store infrastructure in addition to networking aspects. Often, we most commonly associated the term cloud with commodity infrastructure from the likes of like AWS, Azure, or Google.
At any rate, the term is a bit fungible, but there are a few definitional characteristics that have made the cloud so successful. Fundamental aspects like elasticity and cost-efficiency come to mind. Being able to leverage common infrastructure for multiple customer workloads while building in the notion of oversubscription across that infrastructure; a technique that’s been employed by utility providers since time immemorial.
But I would submit that what has truly enabled cloud proliferation can be found in its simplicity. Abstracting the complexity of all the data center resources required to instantiate virtual machines or serverless compute functions via a simple API, web portal, or mobile app with no knowledge or awareness of the physical or logical infrastructure that powers your application on an on-demand basis. Some might refer to this as the platform or SaaS approach. This seemingly benign capability has been the catalyst for much of the digital disruption happening all around us.
What it means to be cloud to the core
But what connotations do we draw from the term core? For Internet Service Providers this has always been associated with the largest, most resilient/protected, and vital components of the network. Those that aggregate all customer traffic to/from the Internet and ensure highly-performant and secure connectivity for customers across the ISP’s footprint. Similar to the cloud, the core is always the most heavily scaled aspect of any carrier’s network. For Windstream Enterprise, scale at the core translates to multi-terabit per fiber pair (and growing) at an optical level and Nx100G (and growing) at the IP/MPLS level. The core is also most often associated with traffic exchange to other ISPs and content providers by way of protocols like BGP. ISP’s (including WE) go to great lengths to ensure the core is highly-available and approaches as near to 100% uptime as possible.
Value of Cloud Core is greater than the sum of its parts
In many ways, what’s meant by the term Cloud Core is the sum of its parts; a highly resilient, available, secure and performant set of network services, exposed in a cost-effective, on-demand, and elastic way as a Network Platform through a set of simplified APIs and user interfaces. But while it’s accurate and appropriate to view the Cloud Core Network in this light, it’s even more instructive to dig slightly deeper into what constitutes the Cloud Core Network and why how it helps solve your business challenges.
The technical aspects of the Cloud Core network are too numerous to articulate in a short blog, but I’d like to touch on two of the most critical: disaggregation and abstraction.
Disaggregation: Perhaps the hottest topic amongst carriers over the last few years, disaggregation is a principle that’s being applied to almost every area of networking; from the decoupling of optical systems into ‘whitebox’ transponders, open line systems, and management systems through projects like Telecom Infrastructure Project Voyager, to the concept of pulling apart physical access methods like GPON and wireless RAN into piece parts and transforming telco central offices into mini data centers through projects like CORD. Windstream is an active participant in both these initiatives and aggressively pursuing both thrusts of network disaggregation as they are key areas for how telco/ISP networks will evolve going forward.
But another angle of disaggregation is perhaps even more meaningful where the Cloud Core Network is concerned: that of microservices. Microservice Architectures are nothing new to webscale players and have increasingly made their way into Enterprise IT environments for their ability to strike a strong balance between speed of delivery and safety of development through things like automated QA and orchestrated horizontal scaling. I’ll stop short of an exposition around all the principles and practices of Microservices-based architecture for now, but will relate that Windstream was an early adopter of microservices in our network ecosystem. And it’s our intention and vision to transform every growth function of our network into a set of cloud native microservices, capable of bringing a new era of modularity, scalability, agility, and programmability into the network.
The visual below illustrates how every layer from customer premise to long-haul and cloud data center will be disaggregated into microservices, chained together for fully programmable network capable of evolving at incredible pace through the use of a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline.
Abstraction: I’m not sure there’s a more foundational software development practice/principle than abstraction. The surest way to ensure modularity and portability in software is to employ abstraction via normalized APIs and data models as often as practical. This is a central tenant for how we approach the Cloud Core Network as well. By leveraging an increasingly course set of APIs as we move from physical – aka bare metal – infrastructure up to the logical or virtual network functions, we’re able to take the complexity that exists from thousands of network elements, signaling protocols, virtual network functions, and connections and expose that as a simple set of outcome or intent-based APIs.
We refer to them as outcome-based because they allow customers to describe the outcome or experience they want to achieve in simple business-related terms rather than a complex and esoteric set of parameters like DCSP, VRF, QAM, or MOS. To be sure, outcome-based services done well require more than simple abstraction, but making the complex simple starts with applying this longstanding software design principle to our network.
Putting the Cloud Core Network to Work at Windstream Enterprise
As you can probably discern by now, this term Cloud Core Network holds both a great deal of meaning to us and is a huge enabler for our customers. Our ultimate goal is to ensure we’re unlocking real business value for our customers by providing optimized yet secure connectivity for their critical applications in simplest and most cost effective-manner possible. As interesting and cool as I think these technologies are, the Cloud Core Network is ultimately not about technology. It’s about enabling the experience they want and empowering them to consume it on their own terms. And that makes it one of the most powerful concepts that’s come along in enterprise networks in a long time, indeed.
Jargon can make even the most exciting new technology seem scary. Yet, for reasons unexplained, technology companies can’t stop themselves from using ‘tech speak’. Network technology is experiencing its biggest transformation in decades, with incredible benefits to enterprise customers. Yet, we can’t help but obscure the significance of what’s happening by using acronyms (SDN, NFV, PN, SD-WAN) to refer to and complicate the building blocks of this change.
That’s unfortunate, because beneath the acronyms lies a fundamental change of the way networks function, separating the “brains” (routing) from the “brawn” (packet forwarding). This deceivingly simple concept is powerful because it centralizes the intelligence and puts the user in control of the network, enabling it to be more dynamic and robust. It’s such a powerful concept, it holds the potential to enable companies everywhere to deliver on the promise of IT/digital transformation and innovate in ways that are simply not possible with traditional networks. Especially those organizations on a high-speed path to the cloud.
Innovating from the “outside-in” is a start, but has limits
The most visible of these acronyms, SD-WAN, has been taking the industry by storm, empowering businesses of all sizes to better manage their networks through elastic connectivity, application-based routing, centralized policy management and powerful visibility/analytics. While many of these benefits can be realized “over the top”, without service provider enablement (or awareness), this DIY, “outside-in” approach can be complex and, quite frankly, misses-out on the true potential SD-WAN technology can deliver. With the underpinning service provider connectivity as an unwitting participant, the core network remains rigid and inefficient. It’s akin to the early days of the automobile era. You may have a cool new car with an internal combustion engine, but you’re still limited by the pothole-riddled roads of the early 20th century.
An “inside-out” Cloud Core approach
What many in enterprise IT don’t know is the full potential offered by these technologies can only be realized if service providers adopt an “inside-out” approach to transform the way their own networks function. In the prior analogy, we need to change the way we build “roads” to align with the new vehicles that drive on those roads. At Windstream Enterprise, we’re embracing and combining this wave of new technologies to enable efficient and flexible network configuration, performance-optimize routing for real-time communications and other latency-sensitive traffic, and enable proactive monitoring and repair. We refer to our approach as our Cloud Core network architecture.
In the cloud, the service provider’s network matters
Unlike traditional networks, our Cloud Core architecture couples the ability to share functions on common hardware with a centralized, software-centric configuration offering end-to-end orchestration and management of components across various domains of our network. This allows us to accelerate service delivery and configuration, adjust traffic flows for optimal performance and speed trouble resolution. Combined with our self-service portal providing control, analytics and enablement across multiple services, and you start to unleash the network’s full potential. Which, in an anytime, anywhere, cloud centric communications/computing environment, can be a huge differentiator.
Committed to the core
As most anyone in enterprise IT can attest, delivering against expectations today requires new perspectives. At WE, we’re committed to this path with the goal of putting full control over the “brains” of the services in our customers’ hands. The first fruits of our labor can be seen in our SD-WAN Concierge, which boasts a full self-service portal, and which is optimized to deliver the highest QoS, as well as with OfficeSuite UC, our easy to use UCaaS solution. We’ve also applied this to our Wavelength Services and have plans to do so to our Ethernet services and a next-gen firewall solution to be rolled out later this year. All good examples of the kind of transformational thinking you should expect from your service provider as you transform your business to adapt and thrive in today’s fast-changing, cloud-centric environment.
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