World Wide Technology, Inc.

#TEC37 Webinar – TRANSCRIPTION“Transform Your Operations with SDN”

June 9th, 2016

INTRO: Our TEC37 webinar is a monthly series focused on a different solution and designed to pack a lot of information into a quick 37-minute format so you can continue on about your busy day.

TOPICS COVERED:

Today we're going to cover essentially three different topics.

1. Current challenges in network operations (Lane Culver, Director of IT)

2. Different SDN automation and orchestration tools (Bruce Clounie, Practice Manager, Data Center Networking)

3. Productivity and financial benefits from deploying these sort of technologies (Matt Long, Sr. Business Development Manager)

4. Getting Started?5. Resources6. Q&A

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): To start out with, we're going to talk about the amount of information that we see out there for various SDN solutions. We really don't know what the impact we have, on the operational aspects on our customer's networks today. Lane, I will start with you, and if you could talk to us a little bit about where the challenges you have in supporting WWT's internal network?

CURRENT CHALLENGES IN NETWORK OPERATIONS

Lane Culver (WWT, Director IT): Sure, Dave, thanks. We spent a lot of time internally over the last year or more, with automation, I'd say more broadly than just with software defined networking. Really trying to get down to what is the business outcome, and the clarity of what we want to try to affect from a business perspective on a daily basis. We spent time starting with more traditional automation, around things like – provisioning of virtual machines – provisioning of infrastructure, implementing configuration management to ensure that we're automating a lot of the patching and the

maintenance and production that we do on a daily basis. I think we've now crystallized that over the last several months. And we’re very focused on quick delivery and efficient delivery of business applications to support our business here at World Wide. We've been working very closely with the development organizations to enable to continuous delivery environments so our developers can deploy applications to support our business when they need to do that. We moved from a more traditional weekly maintenance window-- where we have more opportunity in a week to deploy functionality to support the business, and we're now getting to the point where we can do anytime deployments, even during business hours and not have to take systems down to be able to do that. So we're now taking that and starting to extend out a lot that of automation that we have done so that we can also encompass the network provision pieces of that. Today, when we can deploy applications in our automated manner, if it's the first time we deployed that automation, or that application, we also then have some additional steps where we create additional tickets and those tickets have to get routed to the network teams to do the appropriate set up, of say routing rules or load balancing rules to enable that applications beyond the networking be available to our end users. So we're now focused on extending some of the work that we had been doing over the last period of time so that that also encompasses and enables self service all the way out to the network. The other area that we're very focused on is, we went through a large upgrade of our ERP system last year. As part of that, we tried to improve our posture from an internal network perspective from a very flat network where we had the ability for applications to potentially cross from development into production, and test. We did some work to segment and structure that network more effectively using the legacy techniques and technologies that we have in our data center, found that what we have done is created a very maintenance intensive environment where we’re frequently having to get requests from different teams within the organization to open access to lists or implement additional load balancing rules and such, so we're spending a lot of time day to day from a maintenance perspective, supporting the strategy we put in place last year,

and really excited about understanding how SDN can help us improve that posture and through application groups and end point groups and those sorts of things, and policies that we would implement in SDN versus more traditional constructs of how we would manage the network, I think we can see great improvement there as well.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): So it sounds like a lot of the issues or a lot of the challenges WWT had are very similar to what we see in our customer base, and with that, I'm going to turn to you, Matt, and ask you about financial ramifications that you see around network operations.

PRODUCTIVITY & FINANCIAL BENEFITS FROM AUTOMATION & ORCHESTRATION

Matt Long (Sr. Business Development Manager): I think there are a few areas to build on what Wayne said where the financial ramifications come into the equations, and one of the main takeaways from what I heard Wayne describe is that after the ERP upgrade that we went through last year, there's a lot of manual processes that have to take place to move either infrastructure or applications through our environment from development to tasks and production, there's just a lot of manual steps that take place in each of those phases. By looking at a software defined networking strategy, how can we look to really return time spent on those manual, more mundane tasks, back to those people who are tasked with doing them and fundamentally what that achieves when you can do that, is continuing to do more with the people that you have. There's time that's returned to those resources, we can repurpose them on higher value activities, if you will, that drives financial advantages and productivity benefits inside of that of the business, that's one of the key areas. And then the other one that I look at is just the speed and efficiency that you can move things through your environments from dev to test and ultimately into production. World Wide is no different than any other business, we’re making investments in technology, and new applications that will drive cost savings or revenue impacting benefits to our business. That's why executives make investments

is to deliver financial impact back to shareholders or the business or the people running it. And the faster that you can do those things, the earlier you start to recognize either the cost savings that a new applications or solutions is going to deliver, or if it's the revenue impacting architecture or applications, each day that you wait to actually implement or each day that you delay the roll out that of application is one day less of revenue and the income that goes with it, that you're able to generate. So software defined networking, automation and orchestration, we're going to get into here shortly, drives time to market advantages and from time to market advantages, you start to accrue some of the cost savings and revenue benefits of the solutions that are being deployed.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): So correct me if I'm wrong, but is this an opex savings?

Matt Long (Sr. Business Development Manager): Not necessarily. To a large part, yes, there’s operational savings once you have architecture or a solution in place that's going to deliver those benefits. Sometimes, it can be some investment on the front end, to have an architecture or hardware platform on which some of the solutions we're going to talk about can ride. So it really crosses both of those dimensions. It can be cost savings. It can also be revenue impacting as well.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): Well, thank you. So Bruce, in talking about these technologies, we’ve alluded to these SDN processes out there. I have really two questions around that. And the first one is, where do we get started with this? It sounds to me like there's a huge amount of operational complexity, there's certainly an opportunity there to have a cost benefit from this, but where do you get started? Second thing is, what are some of the tools that we can use? What have seen out there in the market?

DIFFERENT AUTOMATION & ORCHESTERATION TOOLS

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): Sure, Dave. I'd be happy to talk about that. The first place we need to start is to have some common agreement on terms. It's, most of our audience is probably read, there's a lot of things out of the marketplace about software defined networking and it can mean many different things to many different people. We have come up with a definition here at World Wide to kind of encompass what we think is the essence of software defined networking. The way we look at that is we say it's a flexible, programmatic framework to optimize the delivery and management of network services. Effectively, that's a very platform-independent product, vendor-independent type of definition. When we're talking to SDN, that's what we're talking about there.

The other thing with SDN is that in the world of SDN it can kind of fit into two main categories. One of those is something that you buy, such as like Cisco Systems ACI, or VMware’s NXS, it could be Nuage, or Big Switch, there’s many, many things out there. But this is something that you purchase. The other thing is it could be something that you build yourself. Many of the modern day network gear they have application programming interfaces to which you can write and direct programs towards them. Either way you could do this, and what we're talking about here, with automation, could be with one of the platforms or it could be something you can build out yourself.

The next piece that I think that's important to understand is that automation, applies in many, many different areas. The area that we're going to talk about here today is specifically networking, and even more specifically, data center networking. So network automation, could apply not only in a data center, but also out in the WAN environment. In today's talk, we're going to focus more on the data center environment.

One of the things that are key to understand here is that with the term automation, you also hear the term, orchestration. Many times it will use them interchangeably. Actually, that's unfortunate, because when they use them interchangeably, it makes it difficult to decipher how to get started, which do I use first, maybe they're the same thing so it doesn't matter. In looking at this way that I looked to define this, this is actually out of a web blog that a lady named, Lori Macvittie from F5, who’s got a great blog out there, there's a reference at the bottom of the screen to that. But in one of her articles, she describes that automation is concerned with a task, like a single task like the turning up of a server or the configuring of a network interface, et cetera. With orchestration, orchestration is something where I take a series of tasks that typically constitute a workflow, and I execute them in succession. So orchestration is concerned with automating that workflow.

So these two things, although they're related, the orchestration is more of a higher-level entity and the automation, is something that's subservient to it. So if you look at the tools, you see an example of that, with tools, we have tools like Ansible or vRealize orchestration, or Puppet, or Chef. These are used for automating tasks. Those tools can be used in conjunction with orchestration tools such as CliQr which is now known as Cisco’s Cloud Center or could be used with vRealize automation and those higher level orchestration tools can call these tools for automation to perform these individual tasks. The point here is that you will have multiple tools. It's not like you will buy one orchestration tool, per se, or one automation tool and that's all you will ever need. It's just not that simple. The analogy I would use here, is like, I know Dave does a lot of work on cars, like I do. We have toolboxes that have more than just a screwdriver and a crescent wrench to work on an automobile. Similarly here, you can have multiple tools when you work through these things.

The last thing to kind of distinguish is that in automation, we can use automation for different purposes. We can use it for initial turn up, or deployment of a device, application or service. We refer to this as deployment automation. Or, we can use automation for the ongoing

maintenance of the device and application or service. The difference between these two, typically deployment is done once per instance, whereas operational automation is going to be done many times, it's going to be used on that entity over its lifecycle. Again, from a tool standpoint, we use similar tools and we can use tools in both instances but it's important to understand because there are different benefits and different use cases.

So, as an example, in our customer lab here, when we do demonstrations for clients, we build environments and tear them down. We build them and tear them down a lot. We do a lot of deployment automation. In other environments, perhaps customer is more concerned about how to maintain this over its lifecycle, give it more benefit. In either case, the tools can be very similar. In this case, Ansible, vRealize Orchestrator, Chef, Puppet, there’s other things, like Phantom, something else you can use in some of these cases. That's an example of some of the tools, how we use them, and again, they will be used in a deployment scenario, or in an operational scenario, that's the automation piece of it.

PRODUCTIVITY & FINANCIAL BENEFITS FROM AUTOMATION & ORCHESTRATION

Matt Long (Sr. Business Development Manager): Bruce, those comments actually lead me to one question and one comment. I'll start with the question. When I think of automation and orchestration, orchestration specifically, sounds like it's going to cross a lot of different functions within, from a business process standpoint. When I'm thinking of a workflow, I think of a lot of hand offs from one person or team to another person in another team. So I would be curious to understand how orchestration kind of plays or helps you cross boundaries, what are some of the things you need to be thinking about to make sure all the people are involved?

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): That brings up a really good point, Matt. Some people say orchestration will help you cross the boundaries. Frankly, it forces you to cross boundaries. If I deploy this server, it's going to need network configuration or need OS deployment, OS customization, and application deployment. Those typically will be in different groups. For this orchestration, to be able to effectively automate the process, or workflow, I should say, those groups will have to work together. One of the things they have to do when those groups work together is they have to hand off a task from one to the next. That handoff process is typically what consumes a great deal of time and can lead to a great deal of miscommunication. So if we orchestrate that entire workflow, we eliminate those handoff processes, we automate them, per se, that's where the real benefit of orchestration comes into play.

Matt Long (Sr. Business Development Manager): That makes sense. The comment I was going to make, and Lane, you can keep me honest with this, but when I look at deployment automation and operational automation, there’s financial ramifications in both of those areas. Deployment, even though a one-time event that, you mentioned, that's not uncommon in a lab environment where you're building up and tearing down frequently, if you're doing that in a manual fashion, there's a lot of time that it takes to do those activities, so by automating that, there's time savings back in those resources that are doing those tasks. Same thing on the operational automation side. If you are operating in a more a traditional or legacy manner to do those

things and there's manual tasks associated with that, any opportunity that we have to leverage these solutions to automate those can return time back to those individuals, that is going to drive a financial impact to the business. The other side is simply the quality or avoidance of mistakes in this process. Any time there's a person doing a task, there's an opportunity from the mistake to be made and especially on the operational side, if you put one of those in and a mistake is made, it can result in potentially one of the dreaded unplanned down times in your production environment. There can be revenue loss and significant time troubleshooting the root cause of the issues in order to restore the environment.

Lane Culver (WWT, Director IT): I would agree, Matt. We see a lot of improvement in our environment from a consistency and a quality perspective for applying patching. We have seen instances in the past where we're just a little out of sync across the plate of equipment that we have. And these tools really help you to enforce that consistency and make sure your consistent across the environment as well as minimizing just the down time that you have and weekend time you're working with folks that are doing, patching things during maintenance windows, that we typically try to schedule on the weekends. So it's providing us with a lot of efficiencies, a lot of ability to guide those activities.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): So Bruce, I'd like to go back to the steps. How do you get started using these tools?

GETTING STARTED?

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): Okay. That's an interesting question in that with SDN automation, doing that, most people say, well, what tools do I need to pick? That's actually not the best place to start. What you have to start off with is you have to change the way that you think. Doing automation requires a fundamental shift in a way that you think about your processes, think about what is the value of your people that you have in the I.T. functions. I think for a lot of our customers, a lot of people say my value as network engineer is that I can configure this

environment device, and I can do it from memory, and I can do it very, very fast. Well, yes, that's correct. But what I really need you is to do is understand what is the business is trying to do and how you can translate those business needs along with your technology knowledge into something that provides benefit. That fundamental shift of thinking is important. The next piece of it is, it's going to take some different skill sets.

You know, most network engineers are folks in server, to a lesser extent are not as familiar with program languages and application program interfaces. This is a real key skill set and something that needs to be developed inside by the networking organizations, storage organization, et cetera, to be able to take advantage of the capabilities that are there. So given that as kind of the backdrop, the next piece of it is two words: start easy.

Don't try and as someone might say boil the ocean, but start with a simple task, something as simple as, I need to define Vlance across the entire network. There's a couple ways of doing that. One way is to log into each and every switch to do it, or, you could use a programming interface to point at, and have it deduct a programmatic standpoint. So that's what you want to do. Automate, find repetitive tasks, look for them, automate them using the API and take advantage of things that may be already written. There are

public repositories. One of those most notable is GitHub. And out there most customers can probably find examples, if not the exact code they need to be able to perform these repetitive tasks. So that's kind of the overall steps, a crawl, walk, run type of approach. And once you have that under your belt, then you can start looking at your operational processes. Perhaps they need some modification to be able to be more effectively automated. The key thing is you look at these steps here, none of this really requires you to go out and buy an SDN platform, per se. Most modern networking equipment will have application programming interfacing that you can utilize today. There are self study courses, there are tutorials on programming languages like Python, et cetera. Again, these are all things that you can do without investing a great deal of time and money.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): So Lane, looking at our WWT internal operations, what Bruce is describing, how does that fit into what you're doing?

Lane Culver (WWT, Director IT): I think it aligns pretty closely. The story that Bruce tells around crawl, walk, run, I think we tried to run very quickly and that's where we really struggled with what are trying to get done here. As we stepped back and started to break things down into more of the task level, and start to automate individual tasks, we started to see more success because we would then be able to take other technologies over the top of that and provide that orchestration across those, and really struggled to get our heads early on, why should I automate this task? It only takes me five minutes to push a button and provision done. Because that task, in conjunction with the next five tasks that needed to be done behind that, to maybe allocate storage, or set up the network or those types of things, we were thinking about it very much, in what do I do as an individual every day and not backing up and looking at it from this perspective. So now that we're starting to tie all those things together.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): So Matt, what sort of cost savings, cost avoidance, should we be seeing in the process?

Matt Long (Sr. Business Development Manager): I think we talked that in large part, Dave, from just kind of back and forth that we have had here, with what Lane just described there, it's really giving time back to those people. You mentioned it only takes me five minutes to push that button to do that one task. But then there's a whole other kind of serial of activities that have to take place behind it, so there's another five minutes and another five minutes, and that compounds itself. So when you can look at automation, and you can automate or orchestrate either a simple task or workflow, it's going to give time back to those resources, and I think Lane and his team is experiencing that today, starting with certain tasks, recognizing some of those benefits, and then figuring out how you can go from just one task to an entire workflow, and really walk through the steps that Bruce was describing. There's going to be financial benefits for each of those steps along the journey. The other side, and we talked about this before, and I don't want to minimize it, is just the quality element of this. Unplanned outages are really costly for us and for our customers. And the quality improvements that these solutions can deliver by avoiding some of this human intervention or human tasks, where mistakes can be introduced, is a huge benefit.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): Thank you.

Lane Culver (WWT, Director IT): Just to expand on what Matt said, you mentioned the savings from within my team for these things. People aren't requesting these things from us just for the fun of requesting them. There's another business outcome or another business driver that, when you minimize those five minutes, it's strung together over time, someone else is waiting for that end deliverable to be able to go out and do something else, to deliver a function. It also speeds that end delivery of other groups that were previously sitting around, waiting sometimes days for us to go through all those steps, now we're seeing where we can turn those things around, two hours versus….

Matt Long (Sr. Business Development Manager): Speeds that delivery up, which often times there's a known cost save or productivity benefit to whatever it is you're going to be delivering to the business, so you accelerate or put forward the benefits there. And if it's a revenue impacting type of application, then there's incremental revenue that you’re enabling by that acceleration.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): True. We talk in general, about a lot of things that you can use SDN for. Bruce, do you have any specific use cases, either within WWT or even some of our customers?

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): Sure. I can think of one of them, Dave. This is an initial deployment type of scenario. Briefly, what we were looking at, we had a customer who purchased the new next generation data center network, something called EVPN. If you're familiar with it, you probably understand it's relatively complex to configure. So this particular customer, they had 50 switches. With those 50 switches, the majority of them required configuration in excess of 700 lines to configure each one of those switches. Little, quick math check, that gives you about 35,000 lines there. Also, it's a large volume of something. It's very repetitive. The majority, probably 80% of the configuration was the same. The other thing is, there's so much of it, there's like 35,000 chances to make a mistake. Then, you have troubleshooting, et cetera. So we had a couple of our architects, Joel King, Matt Mullen, that they used Ansible as a tool. They used an Excel spreadsheet, for variable information, and they used simple Python code. The idea behind it is they would run this Ansible script. It would go out and do the majority of the configuration; it would then call the Python, read the individual unique configuration and push it out there. The thing is, this allowed us to do this in a very short period of time, which is important. Even more important, it was consistent and accurate, which, the reduced the amount of time spent in troubleshooting, configuration, when it was shipped out to customers. There's a good example.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): Are there common issues people see, or things people should do or not do?

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): The two most common things are one; they don't want to change the way they do things. That's a common problem. The second problem is they try to bite off too much all at once. Those are probably two biggest things. Notice, they're not technical issues at all. Those are human issues. That's typically where the challenges lie.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): So at World Wide, we work with a lot of customers around a lot of different technologies and processes. Can you describe a little bit of how we can help our customers?

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): Sure. I'd be happy to. So if you look at how can we help with the adoption of network automation, so we have a methodology. If you want look at this as a global, the entire spectrum, we can look at, say, what is the business case, what are you trying to improve. We can look at particular use cases. We can hold workshops. We can do design review sessions, do pilots and implementation and actual application migration, if need be. We have a variety of resources, consulting practice for the business process analysis, subject matter experts for the workshops and design reviews, and skilled, professional services, resources to do those pieces. Now, you may say, well, I'm not looking to re-engineer my business. Got that, understand that particular piece. So we can do subsets of this. We can have our SMEs come in, talk with your staff and say here's what we see other customers do from an automation standpoint. You might want to start here. We don't have the coding experience. Great, we can help you with that, we can bring in some professional resources. We can do it on a large scale or a small scale.

RESOURCES

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): Okay, we also have a number of other resources, if you want to go to the next slide.

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): Absolutely.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): And we have been working with SDN for three or four years now and we have a number of resources, in terms of white papers, blogs, and videos, that people can go to on our website to get more information about SDN and how we use it in different examples.

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): Absolutely.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): So with this, we can go ahead and open it up to questions. I will go back to Bryan. Do we have any questions from the field?

Q&A

1. Can my legacy routers and switches be managed and automated by an SDN controller?

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): The answer is yes, they can. There are a number of approaches out there. The key piece is, in an ideal world, you want to take an application programming interface, an ACI approach to automating things. But there are also tools and controllers out there that can go in and effectively log in and accomplish some of the same things. So the point here, I think, where the question was getting at, do I have to buy something new to take advantage of the processes? The answer is, not necessarily. In most cases, you can use it with existing equipment.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): And I will add onto that. When you talk about SDN, especially controller based SDN, there's something called a southbound API that allows the controller to talk to the various devices that resides underneath of it, at the forwarding layer. And in many cases, those APIs are common protocols that they're using today. So southbound API can be SNMP or CLI. So just to reinforce your answer, you don't have to necessarily buy new gear.

Bruce Clounie (Practice Manager, Data Center Networking): That's our whole approach here. There's a mind set in the marketplace that I have to buy an SDN package before I can do anything. That's simply not true.

2. What is the biggest challenge you're facing in I.T. operations today?

Lane Culver (WWT, Director IT): I think, this is a question that we’ve covered fairly well throughout the presentation, but it's really about shifting the work that we’ve historically done on a day to day basis from very transactional, very siloed, to be able to step back a little bit and look across the pieces of that within the organization, to be able to look at the work different. And then allow the resources that we have who, frankly, don't get the satisfaction day to day of coming in and just working on break fix and small support things that need to be done to keep the business running and allow them to start working on higher value things that Matt talked earlier. How do we deliver more value to the business with the same resources, as well as helping to bring those resources into a new paradigm of, we talked about programming languages, those types of things, how do we get the education and the time allocated to these resources to be able to change their way of thinking, and retool a little bit and focus on things different.

3. Is there any one area where customers are seeing cost savings through automation?

Matt Long (Sr. Business Development Manager): Yeah, I don't know if there's any one area to hone in on. We talked about a number, in the course of the session today, about deployment, and operational impacts through automation and orchestration, so those are key ones in terms of driving out time on some of those manual activities, to free up the resources as Lane just articulated. In response to the last question, to kind of redirecting them to other activities. The other one is simply the avoidance of mistakes in manual processes. Bruce talked about that in his example, and we talked about that in large part in deployment and operational benefits. We're all human, we all make mistakes. If there's the opportunity to avoid those,

there's can be significant financial impacts that can be avoided when looking at leveraging some of these solutions.

Dave Chandler (MODERATOR): Thank you. I think we will go ahead and wrap up. First of all, I'd like to thank the panel here, Bruce, Lane, and Matt, for your time today. Also thank the folks out there on the Webex. I want to let you know we're going to be continuing this conversation on our Facebook page, so find us on Facebook. And also, go to our website at https://www2.wwt.com/sdn/. Thanks again.

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