By now, most military organizations understand Software Defined Networking (SDN) can be implemented to help resolve crucial challenges, delivering greater situational awareness and configuration control while simultaneously lowering costs.
Once implemented, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) may be added to SDN infrastructures to make it possible for defense and intelligence organizations to deliver even greater agility and flexibility in network operations, by reducing the time it takes to deploy new network services. This will allow military organizations to keep pace with quickly-changing mission requirements. NFV also lowers costs by reducing the need to purchase purpose-built hardware and supporting pay-as-you-go pricing to eliminate wasteful overprovisioning.
Ciena’s Bob Kimball will join Thomas Sasala, CTO of the Army’s IT Agency, for an update on DoD’s virtualization efforts in a special free webcast on March 10. Click here for more.
NFV addresses several current cost and inflexibility challenges inherent in special purpose network appliances, such as firewalls, server load balancers, and WAN optimizers. It virtualizes these intelligent features and runs them on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers to enable elastic scaling of service velocity—lowering both capital and operating expenses.
This is likely why industry observers anticipate strong demand for NFV over the next several years. In June 2014, Analysys Mason, a market research firm specializing in the telecom, media and technology sectors, issued a report stating NFV worldwide revenues will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 73 percent, from $273 million in 2014 to $2.43 billion in 2018. Strong spending is expected due to NFV’s leveraging of cloud computing hypervisor technologies, which are quickly maturing, according to Analysys Mason’s research.
The virtualization of network services like firewalls and encryption is crucial to military operations, which require dynamic network infrastructures to efficiently meet the varying demands of ever-changing mission requirements in various geographic locations around the globe. Rapid service creation enabled by NFV allows military planners to flexibly create ad hoc networks to keep pace with those changing IT requirements. When individual workloads are abstracted from underlying hardware, software can be used to determine where best to place and connect workloads so they run most efficiently. NFV can be used to help defense and intelligence agencies build and leverage highly flexible and responsive networks that are closely tied to specific mission goals.
With NFV in place, military IT professionals will no longer be forced to anticipate usage requirements before networks are deployed. Currently, in order to turn on new services at a given location or facility, military organizations must estimate how many people and how much capacity is needed before deployment. If these estimates are not accurate, costly inefficiencies for military network operations can result. Using NFV, organizations can more quickly deploy network services, and move network services to new locations as needs dictate, or missions shift from one location to another.
By implementing SDN and NFV, military organizations stand to gain the open, agile network performance needed to migrate away from rigid, inflexible CAPEX investments that don’t allow for the rapid and cost-effective delivery of new services. By moving to an SDN infrastructure that also utilizes NFV, defense organizations can readily leverage platforms that are immediately responsive to new loads, demands and capabilities. NFV allows military IT professionals to shift network services around, and even pull them into cloud services, to enable greater delivery flexibility as mission requirements shift or more locations are brought into critical operations.
Since coalition networks are now a fact of life, NFV can reduce the associated challenges involved in setting up such networks with international partners around globe. Using NFV, military organizations could roll out services to specific partners, based on the level of trust, or specific mission requirements. Also, military analysts may soon be able to use NFV services, for example, to encrypt and decrypt classified files that must be sent to other locations. Much like an app store, these analysts could purchase an encryption app, downloading this service to the locations where encryption is needed, and installing this capability at necessary endpoints, setting up and using this service in minutes, rather than the hours, days or weeks that such services require today.
In defense and intelligence organizations, most all network functions may someday be virtualized, just as compute, storage, and I/O operations have already been virtualized in most data centers today, to deliver more flexible and efficient performance.
Ciena’s Bob Kimball will join Thomas Sasala, CTO of the Army’s IT Agency, for an update on DoD’s virtualization efforts in a special free webcast on March 10. Click here for more.
About the author: Bob Kimball is Chief Technology Officer for Ciena Government.
