This is the third part of my series of posts on trends of vendors to latch on to the SDN bandwagon. For more information, refer to parts 1 and 2. In this post I discuss how a few of the services vendors have responded to the buzz around Software Defined Networking.

WAN Optimization

Riverbed claimed it was riding the SDN wave at VMworld 2012 when it announced its latest release of Cascade. However, they went by the second definition I used in Part 1, which says that SDN decouples physical and virtual networks or overlays (not Control Plane and Data Plane as the other definition emphasizes). The difference is subtle. Riverbed partnered with VMware to develop the IPFIX record format that can provide VXLAN tenant traffic information as well as VLAN tunnel endpoint information. Thus, they claim, Cascade is SDN-ready because it is VXLAN-aware.

Silver Peak also pumped its chest at VMworld 2012 with its Agility announcement, which is a plug-in for VMware vCenter. Agility allows administrators to enable acceleration between workloads within vCenter using the vSphere interface that server administrators are familiar with. This requires Silver Peak’s Virtual Appliance to already exist within vCenter. Almost three months after the announcement, details are extremely thin. Silver Peak has been drooling about Nicira ever since the SDN champion was acquired by VMware. Indeed, all you have to do is Google Nicira and Silver Peak and observe all the enthusiasm that Silver Peak has shown for Nicira. But the feelings are not mutual. Silver Peak claims it is working with Nicira and leveraging Nicira’s Open vSwitch, but Nicira/VMware have made no such announcements. In fact, there are no further details about this relationship on Silver Peak’s own website.

Exinda is so far behind on the SDN learning curve that the only mention of SDN on its website is a hyperlink to the SDN Wikipedia page in a blog post written by the VP of Marketing that reported his observations from Interop 2012. Clearly Exinda has a long way to go before its SDN strategy can be taken seriously.

Load Balancers

As of VMworld 2012, F5‘s Big-IP products can support native VXLAN functionality and will be have VXLAN virtual tunneling endpoint capabilities in the first half of 2013. What that exactly means is vague at this time. The press statement I linked to is the only mention of Big-IP’s current SDN capabilities. My guess is that they’ve opened up some APIs to VMware to allow programmability.

Embrane uses an under-the-cloud approach of offering cloud providers a platform that delivers elastic Layer 4-7 network services to their customers. The services include Load Balancer, Firewall, and VPN. Embrane’s heleos architecture is a radical solution that comprises the Elastic Services Manager (a provisioning tool) and the Distributed Virtual Appliance, the latter being a logical network services container instantiated across a pool of general-purpose x86 servers. The issue likely to raise eyebrows is that each service that is part of their platform is a wrapper around an open source distribution. I haven’t heard of too many providers willing to vouch for ipchains as a Firewall.

Firewalls

Palo Alto Networks earned its stripes by making its firewall appliances with merchant silicon. To  stay ahead in the SDN era, it announced a technology partnership with Citrix in October 2012, but has not yet released a product offering.

Big Switch Networks, a leading SDN player, announced, on November 13, 2012, its ecosystem of Technology Alliance Partners that included Palo Alto Networks. However, Palo Alto Networks has not mentioned this on their website, which is odd given that partnerships are what have made Palo Alto the hugely successful company it is today. One would expect them to be on top of it.

So there are no SDN-friendly firewalls currently on the market other than Cisco’s Nexus 1000V portfolio, which includes VSG and ASA 1000V Cloud firewall.

Summary

It appears, from these observations, as though partnerships are key to ousting incumbents in the SDN world. Much of SDN support at this time is just hype, but sellable products will come out soon. The industry also needs the open source movement to challenge the VMware-centric ecosystem to enable a higher level of interoperability and allow for more flexible orchestration and programmability. OpenStack is that approach. More to follow in future posts.