Chris Wade

Author Archives: Chris Wade

Network Automation and the Lack of Innovation in the Management Plane

Chris Wade Chris Wade serves as the co-founder and CTO of Itential, a network automation software company focused on simplifying and accelerating the adoption of network automation and transforming network operations practices. There has been tremendous innovation in IT infrastructure with the adoption of cloud-scale architecture and a migration towards modern applications. In contrast, Enterprise networking has been viewed over the last 30 years primarily for moving data between client-server applications. This basic premise along with consumer devices drove innovation in the network domain to prioritize “speeds and feeds” as the primary objective for networking vendors. Even with the adoption of cloud-scale infrastructure, most adoption meant a migration from current data centers to cloud platforms for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) which didn’t dramatically impact networking requirements. For some context on network innovation, it is important to break network devices into their logical components. A simplified view of networks separates general functionality into three primary components: Data Plane — Movement of packets or network data between network elements Control Plane — Decision logic of where to send network data on the data plane Management Plane — Interfaces that allow users & external systems to modify the behavior of the network. Continue reading

SD-WAN Must Tackle the Multidomain Problem

Chris Wade Chris Wade serves as the co-founder and CTO of Itential, a network automation software company focused on simplifying and accelerating the adoption of network automation and transforming network operations practices. SD-WAN (software-defined networking in a wide area network) was originally touted as a way to leverage both private (MPLS) and public (internet) networks to route traffic to the most appropriate network. Over time, SD-WAN has evolved and enabled the acceleration for more innovative services. In an effort to extend SD-WAN into a multicloud reality, SD-WAN 2.0 enhances security and analytics while connecting innovation at the edge with application and cloud concepts. While we have seen tremendous innovation in the cloud ecosystems, network and application domains are adopting similar concepts to build software-centric, programmable networks. Given these applications and networks now span clouds, data centers, WANs, LANs, and edge, the automation of networks should be viewed as a Multidomain problem. Each domain has unique challenges which should be automated locally while providing an end-to-end capability to align with the target network reality. Applications and services are becoming more distributed and require connectivity and policy enforcement across a variety of domains. Whether it is zero-trust security, intelligent network automation, Continue reading