Featured Interview: Cariden Back to Reality - You Can't Wish Away the Physical Resources

We hope you are enjoying our interview series at SDNCentral. We’ve been having a blast, chatting with a wide variety of SDN community participants, from CEOs to security experts to open-source project leaders. This week, we have a different flavor of featured interview. There’s been buzz around how SDN can be applied to wide-area and carrier networks but we’ve had few examples to date. The folks over at Cariden, experts in traffic management, turn out to have an interesting perspective on SDN, with some compelling real-world examples. We present here an interview with Jeff Bazar, VP of Strategic Products over at Cariden.

SDNCentral: For some of our readers unfamiliar with Cariden, can you provide a brief overview of your company?

Jeff: “Absolutely. Cariden is a self-funded company founded in 2001 and profitable since 2003. We have emerged as the de facto standard provider of IP/MPLS traffic management software. We provide planning, traffic engineering and operational intelligence software for carrier networks worldwide. We serve the majority of Tier 1 service providers and are proud of the market validation we have had with consistent growth, 50% CAGR since 2008, and extremely high renewal rates of over 95% in deployments that include many of the most challenging networks in the world.”

SDNCentral: You are well aware that SDN is hot and we’ve seen a large number of vendors jumping on the SDN bandwagon. I have to ask: does SDN fit into Cariden’s core strategy, or are you a bandwagon jumper?

Jeff: “Interestingly enough, software-defined networking is a good umbrella term for operational solutions that Cariden has been delivering for many years now—you could say that from our perspective, SDN is a revolution a decade in the making. I’ll cover some of that detail when we talk about customer use cases.

Nevertheless, in response to heightened market interest and readiness, we’ve developed an admissions module and integration with OpenFlow controllers for our recently announced NS-OS.

Our path has always been to work with our technology-leading customers to bring the benefits of network visibility and automation. We will continue that path with the NS-OS and will continue to publicly demonstrate software elements such as the admissions module and OpenFlow interface periodically as we work towards a general release of the NS-OS.

In our most recent public demonstration (Carrier Cloud Summit 2012), we highlighted our new distributed cluster technology for answering admission requests in real time at the rate of four hundred thousand queries per second on a single commodity server. We will be holding similar demonstrations for OpenFlow integration in the Fall.”

SDNCentral: What distinguishes Cariden from other SDN companies?

Jeff: “Most importantly, Cariden’s SDN bona fides are counted in deployments and renewals rather than trials and PoCs. We have had a head start on providing a software abstraction of network resources in production environments. All other companies who want to participate in this space must go through the vetting and maturation that Cariden has already passed.

Secondly, SDN will be adopted gradually and incumbents such as Cariden have an advantage in being a trusted partner for providing safe passage to the future.

Thirdly, customers appreciate fully working solutions. Cariden has a complete suite for Infrastructure SDN and has the partnerships in place to provide infrastructure awareness for virtualization and micro-timescale visibility.”

SDNCentral: Let’s delve more into these working solutions you mention and cover some details around what you term as Infrastructure SDN.  What key problems are addressed by Infrastructure SDN?

Jeff: “Infrastructure SDN is the umbrella term we are using for the software that manages a pool of network resources.

I’ll discuss four use cases that help describe Infrastructure SDN. You will notice a theme here. There are large benefits in centrally managing pools of resources and that management requires a coordinated combination of global visibility, predictive modeling, service intelligence, and device control.

1. Managing a pool of transoceanic network resources

Example: One of our customers exchanges over a quarter terabit per second at peak time between South America and the United States. They pay dearly for the connectivity between the two continents and would like to make full use of that capacity but they are stymied because the connectivity is first split four ways between two pairs of cities, then amongst twelve routers, 20 interfaces and almost 100 ports. The routers do not have a global view and the operators are challenged with a difficult balancing act.

A centralized view/control model was the key for us in abstracting the various ports, interfaces, circuits and city pairs such that the two sides of the network basically saw a transparently managed 400Gbps pool of connectivity between the networks on each continent.For this solution, Cariden’s discovery software provided a global view of the network elements, while the modeling software provided a view of traffic under failure, and the path layout intelligence provided the load-balanced paths. Finally, we used the existing router controls to push the paths down to the network elements. The results were an increase in utilization from 70% to 95% and correspondingly over $20M per year savings in just this one section of the network.

2. Managing a pool of fiber resources

Currently, the most failure-prone portion of the WAN is the fiber infrastructure. The router chassis and line cards have high availability but fiber cuts are inevitable. The challenge in managing fiber resources is being able to “reprogram the network” to respond to failures in a timely manner: seconds and minutes, as opposed to hours and days.

At one customer, for example, failure mitigation would regularly take three to four days. With software automation, we were able to use an up-to-minute global view, a traffic model, routing intelligence, and deployment automation to cut the mitigation time down to minutes by automatically providing a way to steer the traffic away from the links on the broken cable.

The results were that Mean Time to Mitigation (MTTM) decreased from four days to 10 minutes, and of course there was an associated reduction in customer complaints.

3. Managing data center interconnect resources

Here, the challenge is not just in controlling the geographic spread in network resources but in controlling the spread across time, and providing an API to applications that need network interfaces. For example, applications such as data center backup and VMotion would use the API to get a slice of the network at its most economic time and place.

Google’s demonstration at ONS 2012 is a good example of this use case. Here again, the key is the combination of the global network view, a traffic model (especially across time), service intelligence to route according to latency and resiliency requirements, and device control, which was achieved with OpenFlow in this case.

The results reported by Google were that utilization increased from 40% to 100% for a much better optimized network and increased flexibility and control over the resources.

4. Managing resources within the data center

Although the least talked about area, data centers have a need for actively managing network resources.  As pointed out by SDN analyst David Lenrow, virtualizing solutions like those offered by Nicira manage the network bindings but “abstract the physical network and specific topology out of existence.”

But just as storage devices are managed by storage virtualization—someone has to ensure the individual disks do not get overfilled and that the storage is resilient —network resources similarly have to be managed by virtualization software to ensure that switches and ports do not get overfilled and that the bandwidth is resilient.

Data center traffic differs in that microbursts add an additional variable to the need for explicit management of large flows. Our customers are maintaining low average network utilization within the data center, even though this does not fully guarantee protection against microbursts.

We currently provide the visibility, model, intelligence and control of jumbo flows, and we will work with our hardware vendor partners to provide the microburst visibility as well.

Current results are that our customers obtain the ability to use the backup data center live for a 2x savings and enjoy the increased headroom while we work to provide more granular visibility.

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