Maybe it is because cloud computing is still in the early stages but many continue to underestimate the complexity the network brings to the cloud. The network was not designed to support cloud services, it is complex and it is cumbersome to re-provision every time there is a change in resources.

Greg Ness stated, “A VP cloud for a larger enterprise told me that his networking team had more than 30 steps to simply provision a server to the network.  There were close to a dozen highly-skilled network pros involved in the process.  He discovered via audit that the cost to move a server was more than half the cost of buying a new one,” in a recent Blog post that Network Automation is Inevitable.

Network and cloud automation has to happen before the cloud can truly be cost-effective.

The goals of an orchestration system are to maximize the business leverage that can be gained from virtualization and to greatly simplify the management of the pervasive virtualization of data center resources. Therefore, virtualization and orchestration are highly complementary technologies that together enable the implementation of a dynamic data center model.  An orchestration system achieves its goals by automating the provisioning and operation of network services.

To learn more, read this article.

The papers focus on the benefits of virtualization and discuss the need for service orchestration and automated provisioning. Service orchestration is an operational technique that helps IT organizations to automate many of the manual tasks that are involved in provisioning and controlling the capacity of dynamic virtualized services.

Dr. Metzler states, “Unfortunately, while computing resources have become virtualized and dynamic, most of the rest of the IT infrastructure is still physical and static.  As a result, deploying new services and/or making changes in the alignment of all the infrastructure resources (e.g., servers, networks, security and storage) that support a service typically requires numerous time-consuming manual tasks that span a number of technology and organizational boundaries.  This combination of tedious manual processes and the inefficiencies created by organizational silos leads to escalating workloads and operating expenses.  This combination also leads to having processes that don’t complete in seconds or minutes, but in days or weeks. Service orchestration can automate the configuration of physical and virtual entities and can control the allocation of resources shared among a number of virtual services.  Because it provides this functionality, service orchestration enables IT organizations to substantially lower cost and improve operational efficiencies by maximizing the leverage achievable from a shared pool of resources within the virtual data center infrastructure.”

LineSider’s OverDrive solves these problems.

Feature editor Beth Schultz writes “Why it’s interesting: This technology will become increasingly important as enterprise IT adds desktop virtualization, test lab automation and other highly dynamic workloads to the data center, says Rachel Chalmers, infrastructure management research director at The 451 Group. While IT has a choice of automation software for provisioning and de-provisioning virtual machines on the server side, the same hasn’t been true for switches and routers that connect those systems to one another. That’s the gap LineSider is trying to address, she says. Perhaps better called an abstraction layer than virtualization, OverDrive ‘provides a uniform interface through which those devices can be controlled automatically according to business policy,’ Chalmers adds.”

Check out this article written by LineSider CTO Ken Ferderer

Network Services Virtualization
— Data center virtualization is changing the way we think about today’s networks. Stress fractures have begun to appear in the network triggered by the increasing adoption of virtualization around datacenter compute and storage platforms. The virtualization of datacenter resources, while good for the efficient utilization of costly physical resources, is placing enormous demands on the underlying network and operational support teams in terms of increasing support costs and time spent implementing changes to the infrastructure driven by the dynamic nature of virtual services. Traditional network designs and the tools that control and manage them cannot keep pace with the dynamic nature of virtual services.

In the report, 451 analyst Rachel Chalmers states, “Cloud computing is virtualization plus automation and while many companies offer good policy-based provisioning and runtime automation at the service tier far fewer offer comparable functionality for network devices. Yet the network, along with storage tier, is the Achilles’ heel of infrastructure that aspires to cloudiness. By interpreting business policies so that they can be enforced and playing nicely with existing network and configuration management arrangements, LineSider offers a tempting prospect to overworked network administrators who are trying to support private and public clouds.”

LineSider Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of network services virtualization today announced that they have expanded their sales and marketing team in response to the escalating need to transform networks that can respond rapidly to changes in virtualized computing and cloud provider environments. Seasoned veteran John Donnelly III has been appointed Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing and will lead the newly expanded sales and technical team based in Boston, New York and London….more

Datacenters, users and applications have all become fluid resources in this new flexible computing models such as cloud, however the network was not designed for this new dynamic reality.

The network is still static.

Every time an application, computer (physical or virtual) or storage resource changes in the virtual datacenter, there needs to be some type of manual intervention to provision network services and repair broken security and access models. The gains enabled by server virtualization are diminished by network operating overhead.

In fact one of the biggest challenges facing large virtual computing and cloud deployments is the enormous amount of operational time spent on creating and modifying network connectivity, data center access while maintaining security to support virtual computing. This is especially true in cloud environments where virtual devices are being added, moved or changed regularly between physical locations or network segments.

To make matters worse, network access and security models are being exposed as the weak link in virtualized environments. It is becoming harder and harder to know what data is being accessed and by whom. This places an enormous burden on enterprise network and security teams and existing infrastructure management tools that define and maintain access and security models in these highly fluid environments.  In many cases, the cost of operational support activities to maintain access and security are a significant burden to IT budgets already stretched thin.

Virtualizing the network provides the similar benefits as server virtualization through abstraction and automation;

• Increased operational flexibility – The network becomes fluid and dynamic enabling organizations to quickly respond to market changes and changes in the computing environment.
• Leverage existing network resources – Network virtualization provides more efficiency, utilization, and flexibility of your existing assets.
• Improve operational efficiency – Reduce operational costs and increase security, manageability and scalability by abstracting and automating network services.

The bottom line: In 2010, the network is going to become as fluid and dynamic as the data center is today. LineSider’s OverDrive abstracts and virtualizes network infrastructure into a comprehensive network service model, making the network available for automation response to changes occurring to dynamic resources such as users, applications, virtual compute, physical compute and storage.

This entry was originally run in www.vmblog.com  as part of it series on Virtualization and Cloud Predictions for 2010.