{"id":1963,"date":"2016-11-23T09:26:53","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T09:26:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/live-infoblox-blog.pantheonsite.io\/?p=1963"},"modified":"2020-12-05T17:13:12","modified_gmt":"2020-12-06T01:13:12","slug":"don-t-forget-one-critical-piece-when-modernizing-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.infoblox.com\/blog\/community\/don-t-forget-one-critical-piece-when-modernizing-service\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Forget One Critical Piece When Modernizing Service Providers’ NFV and SDN Architecture"},"content":{"rendered":"

We all know service providers must balance costs while delivering the fast connections and always-on access to websites and apps that consumers expect from their mobile devices. Managing such huge volumes of data and being able to provide new, competitive services and roll them out quickly \u2013 while remaining profitable \u2013 is requiring service providers to make significant changes to their infrastructure.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s requirements bring in a whole new paradigm and it\u2019s only going to become more challenging. As consulting firm\u00a0Deloitte projects<\/a>\u00a0into the future: \u201cDifferent platforms and networks adapted and optimized for different uses (content delivery, real time video gaming or smart second plane sensor metering), ultra-high density of connected devices and sensors and a new complex network orchestration\u2026 will be necessary in a multi-connected world.\u201d<\/p>\n

To meet these new demands, most large telecoms are in the process of transitioning from traditional, static hardware-based networks to a more responsive cloud-based infrastructure, leveraging network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) as key technologies to enable better service agility and elastic scalability. NFV and SDN also help simplify network operations, which span a complex hybrid of physical and virtual networks, all with their own, siloed user interfaces.<\/p>\n

A new approach to IP address management (IPAM) in a virtualized environment<\/strong><\/p>\n

While the transition to NFV and SDN provides a great deal of flexibility, it also requires a major operations overhaul and heavy reliance on automation to enable service providers to benefit from operational efficiencies. The days of manual processes or custom scripts cannot keep up.<\/p>\n

One key, yet often overlooked, area for automation is IP addressing and domain name system (DNS) provisioning. Even in legacy physical networks, identifying a source of truth for IP address assignments using authoritative DNS and IP address management has been challenging.<\/p>\n

Now with virtualized environments where virtual machines (VMs) are quickly provisioned and spun up and down in seconds or milliseconds and IP addresses dynamically assigned and reassigned, automation becomes critical. It is imperative for service providers to tightly integrate IP address assignment with the creation of DNS records as new VMs are deployed. Then, when demand lessens and VMs are deleted, automation is also needed to clean up DNS records and free up IP addresses on the fly.<\/p>\n

Benefits of DNS and IP address automation<\/h2>\n

To help meet these new requirements, the\u00a0Infoblox Virtual Secure DNS Solution<\/a>\u00a0is an essential component of service providers\u2019 virtualized networks as they transition to NFV and SDN. The\u00a0Infoblox GridTM<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0manages a geographically dispersed, virtualized or hybrid NFV system as one system. Service providers benefit from:<\/p>\n