IBM SDN VE and F5 SDAS: Provisioning at the Speed of Business

#IBMSDE #F5 #OpenDaylight #OpenStack #SDN

As enterprises become familiar with SDN and its benefits, it should be no surprise that one of the most familiar names in enterprise data centers would offer up a solution designed to automate and speed the process of setting up and managing these new networks. That's ultimately the goal of software-defined technologies like SDN and F5 SDAS: to improve the velocity of service provisioning so that IT moves at the speed of business.

“It takes about 5 days from an end-end point of view to provision something like that (a multi-tier system).” Goal is to “get at least to sub-one day.”

-- John Manville, Cisco IT; The Power of a Programmable Cloud, OFC 2013 (OM2D.2)

At the OpenDaylight summit, IBM announced its IBM Software Defined Network for Virtual Environments (SDN VE), designed to help organizations realize the goal of service provisioning at the speed of business. SDN VE is one of the first offerings built with open source and interfaces from the OpenDaylight project as well as support for OpenStack. SDN VE consists of the unified controller, virtual switches for creating overlays, gateways to non-SDN environments and open interfaces for application integration.

IBM SDN VE provides a scalable network overlay that works over existing network infrastructure, using a standard frame format. Leveraging both network virtualization and OpenFlow-enabled physical infrastructure gives organizations flexibility in design and deployment.

It should be no surprise, either, that as the leading provider of application delivery services (L4-7) and long time IBM business partner on the application delivery front, F5 has joined the IBM SDN Partner Ecosystem. Within the SDN VE framework, F5 SDAS will provide load balancing and application services via what is rapidly becoming the standard for real-time network integration, service chaining.

IBM's approach aligns well with F5 Synthesis and its Software Defined Application Services (SDAS) with both focusing on improving the speed of service provisioning without sacrificing critical application and infrastructure services like availability, performance, security, mobility and access and identity control.

F5 is pleased to continue to expand its partnership with IBM with SDN VE and SDAS.