Correlating Overlay and Underlay SDN Performance

Next month Packet Design CTO Cengiz Alaettinoglu will address the MPLS SDN World Congress in Paris about the need for SDN analytics to monitor and correlate the performance of overlay and underlay networks. Below is a summary of his presentation, which will take place on Thursday, March 19 at 4:45 p.m. at the Marriott Paris Rive Gauche Hotel & Conference Center. (If you are attending the conference, please visit us in booth #401. In addition, Packet Design customers are invited to our first ever Customer Symposium being held on Monday, March 16 at the Rive Gauche Hotel. For more information or to register for this free event, visit http://ssp.packetdesign.com/2-uncategorised/288-paris-customer-symposium). 

The Role of Analytics-Based Orchestration in Overlay and Underlay Networks 

Industry focus on software defined networking (SDN) has been in three segments: the data center, the enterprise-WAN edge, and the WAN itself. Certain services and applications will require orchestration across these segments. For example, when data center compute resources become unavailable, some virtual machines (VMs) will need to be moved to other data centers. External traffic to these VMs, as well as the east-west traffic that was confined to the data center, will now have to traverse the WAN. Therefore, paths with sufficient performance characteristics will need to be set up.

Or, when an enterprise-WAN edge orchestrator chooses a particular WAN connection for a town hall meeting, CoS treatment and capacity reservation will need to be provisioned in the WAN. Setting up paths for these new workloads without actually understanding their impact on other applications and services running on the network can be detrimental to both the existing applications and to the application making the request.

In this presentation, Cengiz will show how SDN analytics can solve this operational issue and orchestrate paths across the WAN, using a bandwidth calendaring application as an example.

For more information about this topic, visit the Software Defined Networking section of our Web site and/or download the white paper “SDN: Management & Orchestration Considerations.”