7 Predictions on How NFV and SDN Will Mature
Like everything else inside and outside of the data center, the wide area network (WAN) is becoming software-defined. Talari today announced that it plans to accelerate that process with the introduction of a pair of physical and virtual appliances.
The Talari Appliance VT500 is a virtual appliance based on VMWare vSphere virtual machine software, and the Talari Appliance T5200 is a physical appliance that provides support for a 10G fiber-optic interface.
In addition, Talari has updated its Adaptive Private Networking (APN) software, Talari APN 4.4, to enable the controllers to be deployed in the cloud. Previously, Talari’s APN made available only a gateway for the cloud. Talari also added support for IPsec tunnels to improve security.
Kevin Gavin, chief marketing officer for Talari, says that rather than getting locked into MPLS lines or using standard Internet connections for all network traffic, the Talari THINKING WAN approach to software-defined WANs is designed to enable IT organizations to dynamically mix and match different classes of wide area networks (WANs) as they see fit. Next up, Gavin says Talari intends to make those WANs programmable by exposing a standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs) on its appliances.
Gavin says the critical difference between the Talari approach and other efforts to create software-defined WANs is that Talari doesn’t require any changes to be made to the underlying WAN to be implemented. For the most part, Gavin says internal IT organizations are not going to want to have to directly engage a carrier if they can avoid it.
While software-defined WANs are all but inevitable, it remains to be seen how much of this shift will be driven by  the internal IT organizations versus by carriers that are individually moving to expose APIs and virtual networking services through 2017 and beyond. The one thing that is for certain, though, is that those networks are about to become a lot more programmable than they are today.
