“For everything that rises must converge” is a quote from The Phenomenon of Man by the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard theorizes that we are constantly evolving and at some point will reach an ultimate level of complexity and consciousness, called the Omega Point.
Clearly, business and technology are converging as they advance. As business functions, facilities, suppliers, and personnel become increasingly distributed, enterprise-level tools and services are likewise extended to those dispersed users. As a result, infrastructure becomes more complex to deliver network performance required forreal-time data exchange, communication, and collaboration.
Perhaps the title is a misnomer and should probably be, High-Speed Infrastructure Solutions for ERP, because service-oriented architecture tools such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) require that data be exchanged constantly to participate in real-time business processes. In addition to exchanging data, network infrastructuremust now provide additional services such as security, voice, and video that use to be separate. Without a secure, flexible network that’s always available, enterprise business operations would grind to a halt.
According to the Open Network Foundation (ONF), “Traditional network architectures are ill-suited to meet the requirements of today’s enterprises, carriers, and end users.” Fortunately, the ONF, which consists of industry leaders like Google,Microsoft, and Verizon, is pushing software-defined networking (SDN) as a solution. SDN is a new concept in the development, deployment, and sustainment of networks. The idea is to establish standards and protocols for network virtualization that would increase agility and flexibility. The ONF describes SDN as follows:
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging architecture that is dynamic, manageable, cost-effective, and adaptable, making it ideal for the high-bandwidth, dynamic nature of today’s applications. This architecture decouples the network control and forwarding functions enabling the network control to become directly programmable and the underlying infrastructure to be abstracted for applications and network services. The OpenFlow protocol is a foundational element for building SDN solutions. The SDN architecture is:
- Directly programmable. Network control is directly programmable because it is decoupled from forwarding functions.
- Agile. Abstracting control from forwarding lets administrators dynamically adjust network-wide traffic flow to meet changing needs.
- Centrally managed. Network intelligence is (logically) centralized in software-based SDN controllers that maintain a global view of the network, which appears to applications and policy engines as a single, logical switch.
- Programmatically configured. SDN lets network managers configure, manage, secure, and optimize network resources very quickly via dynamic, automated SDN programs, which they can write themselves because the programs do not depend on proprietary software.
- Open standards-based and vendor-neutral. When implemented through open standards, SDN simplifies network design and operation because instructions are provided by SDN controllers instead of multiple, vendor-specific devices and protocols.
—Open Networking Foundation, 2012
Like everything that has risen to the cloud, the network will meet it there. High-speed infrastructure, virtualization, and service-oriented enterprise systems like ERP are the complexity that facilitates increased awareness. By rapidly managing data, automating processes, performing predictive analysis, and collaborating, organizations can decisively respond to market forces and maybe even reach their own Omega Point.
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