Intelligent Data Centres Issue 07 | Page 40

EXPERT OPINION How close are we to the self-operating network? Intent-based networking offers significant advantages to modern infrastructure teams. But how close are we to the self-operating network? Mansour Karam, CEO of Apstra, unravels the rise of intent-based networks and explores whether we can yet trust the most advanced networks to apply their own corrective actions. 40 Issue 07 ntent-based’ increased in popularity in 2018, but how much is real? Intent- based networking is a major advancement towards the self-operating network (known as level 3 intent-based networking), but it is itself made up from many smaller advances. ‘I It has many pretenders offering partial features such as basic automation (level 0 intent-based networking) while missing support for vendor-agnostic infrastructure, single source of truth and the ability to deliver real-time change validation regardless of underlying hardware or operating system technology. The first significant feature of intent-based networking must be an architecture built on a single source of truth, embracing both the intent and the actual network status – including control of every aspect of the network service Without this single source of truth, questions like ‘Which users will be impacted if link x fails or gets congested?’, or ‘What is the link utilisation on all links carrying user X’s traffic?’, mean consulting the network map, checking that it is up-to-date, checking the operational state of every link – and so on and so on. Even when all the necessary data has been collected and collated, the final answer still has to be calculated. Whereas a network with a single source of truth has all the necessary data in that one source and, in a truly intent-based system, the answer to those questions can be automatically and speedily calculated and displayed. www.intelligentdatacentres.com