This week Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is announcing further development of its Application Fluent Network (AFN) vision by successfully having demonstrated interoperability using standards based sFlow and OpenFlow initiatives with InMon for enterprise scale SDN analytics. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, with hybrid OpenFlow capabilities enabled on the OmniSwitch platforms, and InMon, with their sFlow-RT, provide enterprises the benefit of deploying practical scalable SDN solutions.
Most SDN solutions disrupt IT and business operations since they require a complete revamp of the infrastructure and services. Two online demonstrations show how Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise offers a scalable solution that enables inherent, application intelligent SDN capabilities, keeping the CAPEX-OPEX budget under control while meeting business objectives.
· When network convergence creates challenges like competition by different workloads for network resources, SDN can help. In particular, large "elephant" flows due to virtual machine migrations, storage, backup, and replication can interfere with small "mice" flows such as web requests, database transactions, and social media actions that are sensitive to delay. The Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and InMon demonstration shows how 'elephant' flows can be identified and controlled so that both types of traffic obtain optimal performance. Reference: SDN for Elephant Flow Marking
· The Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise and InMon solution also enables enterprises to extend security policies throughout the network with distributed enforcement. The demonstrations show how a denial-of-service attack can be detected and enforced in a distributed fashion across the network in real-time. Reference: SDN for DDoS Mitigation
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is the latest vendor to sign up with the sFlow.org. sFlow® is an industry standard technology for monitoring high speed switched networks. It gives complete visibility into the use of networks enabling performance optimisation, accounting/billing for usage, and defence against security threats.