Shulou(Shulou.com)06/01 Report--

Software-defined network (SDN) technology has been constantly improving, and related standards are also being developed. Although there have been a lot of people talking about SDN in the past few years, there are few successful cases in which SDN actually landed. On May 31st, Dell announced that CCTV-Sophie Media Research Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as CCTV-Soffrey) began to deploy Dell's SDN solution in its private cloud environment after more than a year of evaluation and testing.

Large enterprises are more interested

Zheng Weidong, deputy general manager of CCTV-SOF Rui, said: "We are a commercial enterprise and there is a strong demand for new technologies such as SDN in view of reducing costs, improving its core competitiveness and laying the groundwork for architectural expansion in the next five to eight years." As early as 2008, CCTV-Sophie partnered with Dell in virtualization applications, when VMware virtualization software was not popular in China. "as far as we know, SDN has been successfully deployed among some foreign users. From the perspective of technology maturity, there is no obstacle to SDN landing." "We hope to promote business growth and achieve a greater ratio of investment to industry through the deployment of SDN," said Chen Dong, director of the information technology department of CCTV-Soft. "at the same time, we also hope that Dell can provide us with a full range of services, including personnel training, to jointly deepen the application of SDN."

Speaking of SDN in the domestic "big thunder, little rain" situation, Dell Greater China Enterprise Solutions Marketing Director Peng Yuheng said: "A new technology is bound to go through a process from birth to large-scale commercial use. Some traditional enterprises are burdened with heavy historical baggage, so it is impossible to embrace new technologies immediately. However, from historical experience, some innovative technologies always replace outdated technologies, such as IP technology replacing ATM (Asynchronous transfer Mode) technology. SDN technology is a subversion of traditional network technology, and it will eventually be widely used in enterprise applications. "

At present, Dell has a lot of SDN customers around the world. "We introduced Dell's SDN solution in some domestic meetings, and telecom operators and some large enterprise customers have shown great interest in our solution." Li Haiping, Dell's director of network operations in Greater China, said, "the network is a drag on the cloud computing platform, because the cloud platform is usually dynamically adjustable and scale out, while the traditional network does not have the corresponding function. Once many manufacturers adopt certain network devices, they will not be replaced for a decade. In order to meet the needs of the cloud era, SDN is a better choice."

Safety is the most important

Chen Dong said that through the deployment of SDN, we hope to solve the following problems facing the data center network: first, to achieve a flat network architecture and simplify management; second, the network can be expanded efficiently; third, to build a network that can achieve resource division, isolation, and audit through logical layers; fourth, to establish a fully virtualized switching network; fifth, there is no need for secondary development. CCTV-Sophie finally decided to adopt Dell's high-performance data center switch that supports OpenFlow open protocol, and transform the data center network with BigSwitch commercial SDN switching management software.

"after more than a year of product selection and contact with a number of product suppliers, we finally chose Dell, mainly because Dell's SDN solution has high performance, openness and cost performance, which can greatly improve our management efficiency." Chen Dong said. CCTV-Sophie chose to deploy SDN now, mainly to solve the problems of security, management efficiency and flexibility.

"through the security zone division of business data flow and office data flow, we can realize the concept of network security hierarchical partitioning and in-depth defense, and at the same time achieve multi-level protection and partition management protection, effectively isolate the risks of different levels of security assets." Chen Dongjin explained, "the use of SDN technology will greatly improve the flexibility, resource utilization and security isolation of our data center. Dell Z9000 and S4810 can build 5Tbps (full-duplex) non-blocking, low-latency architecture, which can provide wire-speed performance at full load." At this stage, CCTV-Sophie only intends to use SDN technology in the data center network, while the OA network still uses the traditional network architecture. The physical separation of the two networks is mainly to meet the needs of audit. In fact, from a technical point of view, these two networks can apply SDN technology, and can be logically divided and managed based on software. The Dell Z9000 can support both SDN and traditional network connections.

Chen Dong said: "one of the purposes of using SDN is to build a network resource pool. In the future, regardless of the switch model, we can freely allocate network resources according to application needs, and achieve security zoning through the division of logical resource layers to make the network more secure."

Li Haiping concluded: "the emergence of SDN has turned the traditional three-tier network architecture into a network architecture, realizing the flattening of the network architecture." In addition, SDN extracts the intelligence of the device and turns it into centralized intelligence. This is a major change in network management. Dell can provide Overlay (overlap), OpenFlow and SDN solutions based on proprietary technology according to the needs of different customers. Dell's SDN technology has been integrated with Dell's software-defined data center solution based on smart architecture. "

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