Managing networks in the modern world has become increasingly difficult, often requiring skills and tools that are in short supply. To help fill the gap, networking vendor Riverbed this week announced its new Riverbed Service Delivery Platform (SDP), providing carrier-grade service management tools that aim to bring the DevOps world to networking.
“Essentially, Service Delivery Platform transforms the existing NFV investments into a cloud-like Network-as-a-Platform model where each service becomes a building block to create another service that brings even more value to the customers,” Irina Farooq, Vice President, Products and Strategy, told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet.
As an example, she noted that a service like Hybrid VPN created with Riverbed Service Delivery Platform could become a foundation for new strategic services such as cloud, IoT, and Edge Compute.
From a technology perspective, the architecture of the SDP is broad including infrastructure, configuration, security and policy management capabilities. Additionally Farooq noted that the platform includes Service Intelligence and Assurance capabilities to provide visibility to monitor, react and address performance issues at every level.
“Northbound, SDP provides a Netconf interface and accepts service models in standard languages such as YANG,” Farooq explained. “SDP figures out which services it needs to deploy and which capabilities are required to deliver the service, and then interacts with OpenStack and network controllers in order to deploy the service.”
While Riverbed originally made its mark in the networking industry with its network accelertion and WAN optimization hardware, the SDP solution is software-based and does not require any other Riverbed products.
The SDP approach can also be used to help enable an SD-WAN (Software Defined), thought that’s not its’ primary use-case.
“SDP should be thought of as an abstraction layer that facilitates the provisioning of VNFs required for the delivery of a service using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) / Software Defined Networking (SDN) principles,” Farooq said. “Our goal is to bring cloud like agility to the service providers and enterprises alike.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
