With the drive to harness the cloud, mobility, Internet of things (IoT) and big data, the demands and criticality of the network continue to grow.

IT organizations are already under significant pressure to ensure 24x7x365 availability, and they’ve had to contend with the need to scale to support more traffic, users, use cases, devices, applications and so on. Ultimately, in the years ahead, the demands will only continue to expand, and do so more quickly. To meet these emerging demands it will take unprecedented agility, and the static networks of old won’t cut it in the long term.

That’s why SDN and NFV are gaining significant momentum. While SDN is a concept that’s been around since the 1990’s, its usage until now was mostly limited to communications service providers and the IT shops of the biggest enterprises.

While more enterprise IT shops have started to leverage virtualized components, such as vSwitches and vRouters, it seems clear that more holistic SDN approaches will be required to establish truly dynamic networks that can address emerging demands while remaining manageable for smaller IT shops.

Why the move to SDN doesn’t have to be a leap of faith

One impediment that’s been hindering the broader adoption of SDN is in the area of infrastructure management.

While efforts like fault isolation, availability management and root cause analysis aren’t necessarily a picnic for many IT shops today, the challenges associated with these efforts grow significantly in SDN environments. These networks present unprecedented complexity, and they introduce a dynamic abstraction layer that creates critical blind spots for traditional network monitoring tools.

The good news is that the move to SDN – even for smaller IT orgs – doesn’t require a leap of faith; there are ways to move from traditional networks to SDN in a seamless way, and to gain the visibility and control needed to track and optimize performance and availability in these environments.

CA Spectrum customers are well positioned to adapt to these evolving networks, and their new infrastructure management requirements. The solution is optimized for today’s networks, offering:

• Service-aware management, helping staff discover, model, monitor and manage the relationships between the infrastructure and the business services it supports.
• Intelligent fault detection, automating device discovery and root cause analysis in order to speed issue detection and remediation.
• Change management, providing the visibility and control administrators need to minimize the erroneous changes that lead to performance issues and outages.
• Comprehensive coverage, offering visibility across physical, virtualized and cloud environments; layer 2 and 3 infrastructure; and across a wide range of technologies, platforms and vendors.
• Customized, role-based views, delivering prepackaged, easily customizable dashboards and reports that can be tailored to the specific needs of administrators, users and customers.
• Scalability, as CA Spectrum is the only fault management tool that will be able to scale up to the levels needed to support SDN/NFV.

Further, through its integration support with CA Virtual Network Assurance, CA Spectrum is a solution that will provide a seamless bridge from current networks to future, SDN-powered networks.

CA Virtual Network Assurance provides visibility into all the network components and layers within the SDN/NFV stack, enabling administrators to efficiently operate new virtual networks along with legacy infrastructures. Through this integration, organizations can capitalize on SDN’s advantages, while leveraging their tools, experience and investments.

CA Spectrum 10.1.1 supports this valuable CA VNA integration.  See the CA Community ‘CA Spectrum Upgrade Content‘ for everything needed to easily upgrade to CA Spectrum.

To learn more about visit ca.com/Spectrum and ca.com/VNA.

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