News in Networking: Security-Defined Networking, SD-WAN, and Container Strategies

This week’s top story picks from the Kentik team.

This week the meaning of SDN changed. That is, if you’re working in Cisco’s Security Business. It means “security-defined networking,” which is where this unit of Cisco is focusing its efforts. SD-WAN is still hogging the spotlight, but CenturyLink says it’s “no quick fix.” Meanwhile, containers are a big part of AT&T’s network strategy. “Not everything is suited for virtual machines,” said the telecom giant’s CTO. Here are those stories and more:

• Cisco’s Ulevitch: We Say SDN Stands for ‘Still Does Nothing’ (SDxCentral) OpenDNS creator and Kentik investor David Ulevitch, who now serves as SVP and GM of Cisco’s Security Business, is aiming to change the acronym SDN, typically used for software-defined networking. According to SDxCentral, he joked at a recent fintech conference that “SDN really stands for ‘still does nothing.’ But we think it might actually stand for security-defined networking.”
• CenturyLink: SD-WAN No Quick Fix (Light Reading) The hype of SD-WAN is here. However, “success in this arena needs to be based on establishing long-term customer relationships, not offering a quick fix to the need for Internet offload or cheaper connections than MPLS can provide,” according to Bill Grubbs, network solutions architect with CenturyLink.
• Cisco, HPE Eyed As Possible Gigamon Buyers (Market Exclusive) Cisco and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise have their sights set on network monitoring solution provider Gigamon, according to Market Exclusive. While Gigamon did not comment on whether it’s exploring a possible sale, the company’s shares jumped after the industry rumors started earlier this week
• IBM, Google, Lyft Launch Istio Open Source Microservices Platform (TechTarget) IBM, Google and Lyft this week announced a new OS platform that aims to connect, manage and secure microservices. According to TechTarget, the platform “supports managing traffic between microservices, enforcing access policies and aggregating telemetry data — all without requiring changes to the microservices code.”
• VMware Updates vRealize Cloud Management to Fit Hybrid Cloud Trend (eWEEK) Not yet off-prem is the cloud trend these days, according to VMware, which announced it updated its vRealize technology this week to fit the trend. “We’ve watched the evolution of cloud from on-prem to public cloud and now to hybrid, and we are seeing a lot of customers doing both,” David Jasso, the company’s Cloud Management Platform director of product marketing, told eWEEK. “We’re addressing this trend—including the choices of running our cloud on AWS and/or Azure—in everything we do.”
• AT&T Exec Says Containers Are Key to Network Architecture (SDxCentral) AT&T’s Andre Fuetsch, president of AT&T Labs and CTO, says containers are an important piece of the telecom giant’s network architecture strategy. “Not everything is suited for virtual machines,” Fuetsch told SDxCentral. “When you start looking at various parts of the network where you need speed, reliability, redundancy, there’s some benefits you can get from containers that you can’t get from the alternatives.”

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