Enterprises face a major prob¬lem as they pursue digitisation: a huge gap between what the busi¬ness needs and what networks can offer. All this, while striving to avoid complexity, keeping net¬works secure, while bringing in an element of intelligence in how networks are managed to help reduce operations and mainte¬nance costs.
A way out of this complexity is a self healing network with “auton¬omous driving” capabilities, such as intent-based network (IBN).
An IBN topology incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to auto¬mate administrative tasks across a network. The admin defines the desired state of the network (the intent), and then automated net¬work orchestration software takes over to implement the policies.
According to Michael P. Tous¬saint, research director at Gartner, there has been painfully little in¬novation in the network opera¬tions space in the last decade. IP/ Ethernet/BGP based networks have been for more than 15 years. Despite a variety of automation options since (automation tools, fabrics, NCCM, overlays), true automation hasn’t really taken off.
IBN appeared about three years ago, with Huawei, Apstra and Cis¬co as pioneers of the technology. Moving away from the manual, time-intensive methods by which networks are traditionally man¬aged, the modern networks cre¬ated by these vendors capture business intent and translate it into network policy.
In June 2017, Cisco launched its intent-based networking ini¬tiative, with a vision to create an intuitive system that anticipates actions, tackles security threats, and continues to evolve and learn.
Shortly after, Cisco rolled out its next IBN act – announcing the network as an open platform. The intention was to transform IBNs into fully open platforms that seamlessly integrate into IT systems and business processes.
In early 2018, Huawei launched its Intent-Driven Network (IDN) platform. The Huawei IDN was designed to bridge the gap be¬tween the physical network and business goals by creating a digital twin of the network infrastruc¬ture. These technologies would enable software-defined networks (SDNs) to evolve into intent-driv¬en networks.
Faisal Ameer Malik, CTO, enter¬prise solution sales department, Huawei Middle East said the com¬pany’s IBN strategy was based on targeting clients and customers with large scale or ultra large scale dynamic circuit networks (DCNs). This list includes large enterpris¬es, extremely large public cloud, and industry service providers, as well as carriers. “This is extremely critical for us since DCN is used as the main channel for the deploy¬ment of intent based networking,” Malik says.
There are four levels of intent-based networking beginning with Level 0. Nearly all vendors, and more specifically hardware-based vendors, offer Level 0 intent-based Networking which enables basic automation of the network. Apstra’s Intent-Based Data Cen¬tre Automation is designed with Level 2 intent-based networking technology. This extends beyond basic automation to include a single source of truth for design, deployment, configuration, opera¬tions and analytics of the system (known as Level 1 IBN) in addition to system wide real time verifica¬tion at scale (Level 2 IBN) which delivers intent, collects analytics, and performs verification all in real time.
All the three vendors have since expanded their intent-based port¬folio.
Cisco earlier this year an¬nounced an expansion of its Catalyst portfolio, bringing IBN to more organisations including to branches, across wired and wireless environments and to smaller businesses.
A Cisco wireless controller al¬lows customers to run security, automation and analytics services across wired and wireless environ¬ments using the same operating system. The Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controller can be run on premise, on the cloud, or embedded virtually on Catalyst 9000 switches. It supports current wireless standards and is ready for the 802.11ax standard.
A mid-market switch, the Cata¬lyst 9200 extends intent-based networking to simple branch deployments and mid-market customers. This offers smaller businesses access to enterprise services at a similar price point as the previous generation of Cisco switches.
“As we enter into anintelligent world …, intent based network is not an option but a necessity.”
Business Benifits The benefits of intent-driven networks are many, and growing.Gartner’s Toussaint said busi¬nesses canreduce OPEX asso¬ciated with managing networks and free up senior level network resources to focus on more im¬portant strategic tasks. Addition¬ally, intent-based algorithms can provide better traffic engineer¬ing versus traditional approaches, such as routing protocols. This can improve application performance, he adds.
“Intent-based networking can also help in reducing dedicated tooling costs because intent tools can circumvent the costs of other related network infrastructure tooling, as automation and orches¬tration are embedded in the IBN,” explained Toussaint.
Complex deployments that previously took months can now be completed in hours or even minutes; with IBN, customers can easily upgrade to technolo¬gies, like 5G, without replacing the networking infrastructure, commented Karam.
A familiar source of discontent among IT managers is vendor lock-in. With intent-based sys¬tems, requirements and services definition is done at the system level without any dependency or selection of a specific hardware platform or device operating system. Once the user’s intent is specified, the user has the flex¬ibility to choose specific hardware devices and operating systems.
SDN
Software defined networks have been a boon for data centre op¬erations. IBN simply extends the benefits of SDN to a much higher level.
While SDN is a simple architec¬ture for networks, intent-based networking software helps to plan, design, implement and operate networks. “Intent-based network software can “drive” a network that is either SDN-based or non- SDN based,” Toussaint explains.
The transition from an SDN network to an “autonomous driv¬ing” network is a journey, says Huawei’s Malik.Huawei’s IDN for example covers different segments of the network, starting from introduc¬ing AI fabric into data centres to transform data centres from cloud data centres to AI-driven data centres, to intelligent operations and management (O&M) tools like cloud fabric, which change reac¬tive O&M to predictive O&M using artificial intelligence, big data, cloud and digital twin concept. On the network infrastructure layer, Huawei’s IDN also has introduced new technologies like AI fabric and WiFi6 explained Malik.
“Huawei’s IDN solutions help enterprises roll out large campus networks faster, manage them in¬telligently using Campus Insight AI platform. Huawei’s IDN portfo¬lio also addresses SD-WAN, secu¬rity and transmission,” says Malik.
While SDNs have largely auto¬mated the process of network man¬agement, organisations now require even greater capabilities from their networks in order to manage their own digital transformation.
Organisations increasingly want automated translation of busi¬ness polices to IT (security and compliance) policies, automated deployment of these policies and assurance that if the network is not providing the requested policies, they will receive proactive notifica¬tion. These are some of the reasons driving the move beyond SDN to¬wards intent-based networking.
“Though SDN is a foundational building block of intent-based net¬working, IBN adds context, learn¬ing and assurance capabilities, by tightly coupling policy with intent. ‘Intent’ enables the expres¬sion of both business purpose and network context through abstrac¬tions, which are then translated to achieve the desired outcome for network management,” Al-Zoubi explained.
“Complex deployments that previously took months can now be completed in hours or even minutes.”
The future of the network is one that is completely autonomous with self-healing capabilities, fully secure, closed-loop management, and highly application and user experience-centric networks. “As we enter into an intelligent world where speed, latency, security, availability becomes even more critical, intent-based network is not an option but a necessity,” Malik added.
