| | May 20179CIOReviewToday, hardly a week passes without a significant announcement of a collaboration between a CSP and an SD-WAN solution providerfull duplex, rather a massive flow in one direction and a limited flow in the reverse direction (viewer back to source). Additionally, the VR and AR workloads must pass through the same network, and yet be treated differently. A statically configured network where capacity is designed to match the workload leaves resources stranded.The CSP reduces their OpEx through the automation afforded by SDN, fewer high-cost certified networks engineers are required to maintain and operate the network, and NFV reduces the CapEx when workloads are deployed on SHVS over purpose built solutions of the past. While savings are attractive business drivers, even better business drivers are those that come about in the form of new and possibly innovative services.The end user benefits from a more agile and possibly a more rapid ability to access features through service portals from their WAN providers. The programmable network provided by a U.S. Tier 1 CSP is going on two years in the market and could now be considered a main stream product. With this service, an enterprise customer can dynamically alter the policy of their WAN in near real time, an activity that in the past could easily have taken months. A more advanced application that is now emerging is the Software Defined-Wide Area Network (the SD-WAN). Today, hardly a week passes without a significant announcement of a collaboration between a CSP and an SD-WAN solution provider. Interestingly, this use case has the potential to disrupt the MPLS revenue of the CSP. The SD-WAN enables the enterprise that has branch and central data centers to allow non-critical traffic to be removed (e.g., not tagged) from the MPLS stream and flow directly from the branch to the Internet without being transported to a central data center. This can occur on the same physical interface, or even in some cases over different interfaces. This last use case introduces two additional possibilities, the first is for the enterprise to measure in real time the QoS and if necessary, make routing policy changes in real time. Second, for large enterprises to have multiple service providers WAN interfaces available and do quality, time of day, cost or make any number of other policy decisions (possibly driven by machine learning), in real time and under their own control. Its more than just the provider edge applications, this transformation reaches deep into the core of the network, affecting the EPC, IMS, GiLAN and nearly every other element of the network. The good news is we are only getting started--5G is already heating up for select CSPs, and it is clear that 5G will be built on SDN and NFV. Both the vendor ecosystem and the operations teams within the CSP are going to be challenged to meet the demands of 5G. The use cases will bring to the network a new level of scale, and place additional pressure on the infrastructure costs. The expected growth of connected devices and the incredible levels of traffic they generate, will continue to demand that new and cost effective solutions be driven into the network.While we may not accept that the new language has reached the level of common use that it no longer has special meaning, what we should agree on is that the transformation of the CSP network is well underway, and SDN and NFV are the underlying concepts at the foundation of this transformation.
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