The Equinix Vision for Self-Driving Networks for Interconnection & the Edge | Juniper Global Summit

00:00 [music]

00:07 -Hello, everyone.

00:09 My name is Raj Yavatkar.

00:10 I'm Chief Technology Officer at Juniper Networks.

00:13 It's my pleasure today to welcome Muhammad Md. Durrani,

00:17 who is the Senior Director of Global Network Architecture at Equinix.

00:22 Md., welcome.

00:23 -Thank you, Raj.

00:24 Pleasure to be here.

00:25 -Your last name really brings some fond memories to me because

00:28 I grew up in India and I was a very big fan of Indian cricket.

00:31 My favorite player growing up was Salim Durani,

00:34 who was a flamboyant batsman.

00:37 Welcome.

00:38 Thank you. I appreciate it.

00:39 -Juniper and Equinix have partnered together for many years now.

00:43 We're very happy to have you as a customer.

00:46 What I find most impressive is that you've built one of the most

00:50 trusted, reliable, and secure network which is worldwide.

00:54 Can you say a little bit more about how you have done it?

00:57 -When customer comes and buy colo space from Equinix,

01:00 they need an interconnection portfolio where

01:04 they can connect their data centers to their branch offices.

01:07 They need trusted internet so they can browse an internet.

01:10 They need connectivity with the Cloud providers.

01:13 For that, Equinix needs to build something that give very good

01:17 experience for the customer of its single point click they can have

01:20 that experience of connecting their data centers throughout the world.

01:23 This is where we have to partner with Juniper and we have to buy

01:27 some carrier-grade routers where we can implement technologies

01:31 like segment routing, MPLS Traffic Engineering, VXLANs worldwide.

01:37 Then all that need is programmability capability to an orchestration,

01:44 give customer an API experience to build

01:46 that digital ecosystem that they want to build.

01:48 -That's good. Thank you.

01:49 I always wonder that you have more than

01:52 200 data centers all over the world.

01:55 You have interconnectivity among them.

01:57 You have wide area network connectivity for your customers.

02:00 You provide interconnection to their branch offices.

02:03 You're basically operating in multiple networking domains.

02:07 When there's a problem, how do you pinpoint a particular domain

02:10 and problem within that domain?

02:12 -Totally.

02:12 I think a very good question, Raj.

02:14 I think this is-- We're evolving in how to make that self-driven network.

02:20 It is a continuous effort.

02:21 There are jargons that you're listening about AI and ML and all.

02:25 To build a self-driving network, you need to have rich database.

02:30 You need to grab as much information possible from your network,

02:34 so you can build a correlation when the event happens,

02:37 how you correlate and pinpoint a problem.

02:40 There's a brownfield networks.

02:42 There's a greenfield networks.

02:43 Brownfield, you don't have technologies like streaming telemetry.

02:47 Brownfield, you have SNMP to deal with.

02:49 Greenfield, you can implement streaming telemetry.

02:53 For example, let's say, customer wants to have

02:55 information on how much traffic flowing through your network,

02:58 coming in from untrusted domain to me, and all.

03:02 For all of the work, you need to build a very sophisticated automated

03:06 system with very rich data sets so you can run all of these correlations.

03:11 Equinix is continuously evolving.

03:13 We're not there, but we're getting better.

03:16 Thanks to our partners that they're building features for us

03:19 to make us enable to do and go towards this self-driven network.

03:24 -That's very good, Md.

03:25 I understand, but I always wondered about the following thing that as

03:30 we are here to help you, we are also making a big pivot decision.

03:35 You notice that we call our NorthStar experience-first networking.

03:40 Which means it's not enough to provide high performance, high quality,

03:44 reliable network, but we also want to make sure that our customers, you,

03:49 have the simplest operational experience using our products.

03:52 For example, we introduced Paragon Automation Suite,

03:56 which is for our WAN products to really make it easier to operate them.

04:00 We acquired a company called Apstra Networks,

04:02 which has intent-based networking and closed loop automation

04:05 to make it very easier to manage data center fabrics.

04:08 As we make this, we would then start delivering experience-first.

04:12 I already know that you have lots of large customers, very happy customers.

04:17 The question is what do you do to make sure

04:19 they have the best user experience,

04:21 and what can we do to make it easier for you to do that?

04:24 -Very good question, Raj.

04:25 What we expect from our partners, vendors like you is to give us more

04:29 programmability on the network there.

04:31 The more API you can give us, more we can automate.

04:36 More we can automate, more we can make them more self-driven,

04:40 and we can give more control to the customer.

04:43 They can own their own ports, own part of the network.

04:47 Through an API, they can automate it.

04:50 Intent-based is what the next-gen networks are.

04:55 Customer can come-- On your orchestration portal,

04:57 they can come and define their intent of application.

05:01 Based on that intent, we can carve out network into different intents,

05:06 for example, low-latency intent, high bandwidth intent, best effort intent.

05:10 Based on the application SLA that customer provides,

05:14 we can give an AP experience to the customer

05:17 that with the single click or single API,

05:20 they can provision their data centers.

05:23 They can have their traffic picked or sliced in the network really

05:29 meeting their intent of the traffic.

05:31 Great that you guys acquired Apstra.

05:34 What we're looking from our vendors is to give us more control

05:38 on the programmable level

05:39 rather than CLI because automation using CLI is pain.

05:45 I think it is the right direction that we're going towards.

05:48 -Thank you for that.

05:50 I think one of the things we're also doing with experience-first

05:53 is use of telemetry and analytics.

05:56 I wanted to understand from you what kind of telemetry you already used,

06:00 and how do you apply big data analytics to that, and what can we

06:04 learn from you so that we can start building that into our products?

06:08 -I think most of the vendors, what they're doing is they're giving

06:12 us transport and an encoding.

06:15 For a company like Cloud,

06:17 like Google of the world and Microsoft of the world,

06:20 they have their development armies behind.

06:24 They can build a data lake who can suck up the data from

06:28 a different type of hardware.

06:29 Service providers are not that sophisticated.

06:33 What we need from vendors,

06:35 since the automation of the platform is done,

06:37 is to invest mostly on this data lake, multi-vendor,

06:42 multi plugin type of data lakes,

06:45 where we can get data from SNMP step of the world.

06:48 We can get data from streaming telemetry.

06:50 We can get data from S flow, J flow, IP fix.

06:53 There's so many variations.

06:55 If you go multi-vendor, you have three vendors, your host.

06:57 You have to build that, and it has to be very sophisticated.

07:00 These telcos providers, they do not have this sophisticated

07:05 network development experience.

07:07 If vendor can help us build that data lake as well, and then there

07:11 are algorithms available for MI, ML, and AI, we can run those

07:15 algorithms on top of the rich data set that we grab from the devices.

07:19 Then what we're driving toward is mostly intent-based self-driven network.

07:24 Intent is one thing, but then when a fault happens,

07:27 how do we figure out there's a fault?

07:29 How do we self-correct it?

07:31 At the time I'm self-correcting the problem,

07:33 how I can see the customer data towards the working links

07:38 to give them more resilient, highly available all the time type of network?

07:44 Next, I think, drive from vendors should be to go further ahead in

07:49 the stack and invest in building that comprehensive data lake with

07:54 multi plug-in, multi-vendor, and multi-standard transport encoding.

07:58 -Got it.

07:58 Thank you.

07:59 Md., one of the things I noticed recently that you are taking a big

08:03 step by is trying to offer networking as a service to your customers.

08:07 That's a big development.

08:08 Can you say a little bit more about what you plan to do with that?

08:11 -Yes.

08:11 Equinix has two sets of broad products.

08:14 One is interconnection, which is

08:16 pretty much comprises of physical networking devices,

08:20 Juniper, and other vendors.

08:21 Second set of products that we're building are mostly the edge services.

08:24 We want to build a global edge platform

08:27 that can offer customer a bare metal as a service,

08:30 and then customer can also bring their virtual network functions.

08:34 Now, you have both sides of the world.

08:36 Then if you are in a very small data center,

08:40 we have capability to offer exactly same

08:43 feature-rich interconnection portfolio for our customers.

08:46 -the smaller footprint.

08:47 -Totally.

08:48 Smaller footprint, low-cost entry, and then give customer a ways

08:52 to connect their branch offices through this virtual infrastructure

08:56 to back-office in a regional data centers or a colo data centers.

09:00 This network is a service you want to abstract it as customer has no

09:03 clue what's underneath, whether it is a physical or it is virtual.

09:08 Look and feel should be exactly the same.

09:09 Experience should be exactly the same.

09:11 For both customer at Equinix is low cost as well

09:15 and depends where you're getting the service, and high cost as well

09:18 depends if it's physical versus virtual.

09:21 From a user experience point of view,

09:23 more experience is API driven

09:25 and give customer easy ways to connect anywhere,

09:30 any place within an Equinix data center.

09:34 -Thank you.

09:35 I have a last question, really in two parts.

09:38 I hope you address the both of them.

09:40 One is that, what is next for the networking industry, according to you,

09:45 and more importantly, what is next for Equinix?

09:47 -Totally.

09:48 Next for Equinix and for industry is--

09:52 I think security is a critical function.

09:55 When we start building our edge platform--

09:59 We can do networking very easily.

10:01 It's in our DNS, but when it comes to security,

10:04 it becomes extremely complicated.

10:06 There are two approaches to a networking you can offer

10:09 in a virtual infrastructure.

10:11 You can have VNFs and all these, all centralized.

10:14 Centralized data approach doesn't scale well because if you have colo

10:19 customers-- The challenge that Equinix has specifically-- I'll talk about it.

10:22 Colo customer has 10, 20, 100 gigs of links come in and forwarding

10:26 traffic within Equinix data center.

10:28 If you want to provide security for the customer and you go

10:32 with the virtual VNF, these VNFs has fixed bandwidth of 10 gigs.

10:37 Now, 100 gig traffic coming hitting my 10 gig right there

10:40 am I hitting a bottleneck.

10:41 If you go a physical appliance, the same thing.

10:44 They're so expensive.

10:45 These physical appliance from security vendors that getting

10:49 a bandwidth with security is extremely expensive experience.

10:53 -When you say security, you mean firewalls as well as packet

10:55 inspection, all that stuff?

10:56 -Totally.

10:57 IPS/IDS and stateful firewalls.

10:59 If we start offering those functions inline.

11:03 I have racks, X number of servers, and it is top of the rack,

11:08 none of the vendors so far is building the inline function.

11:12 We are not asking full-fledged firewalls.

11:15 Very few functions in the firewall, IPS/IDS is one of them,

11:19 but then stateful security groups, L4 and L7 load balancers, and routing.

11:25 If we just build these three functions-- Scale is not very huge because

11:28 you're not talking about having 1,000 customers on their top of the rack.

11:33 Typical configuration is 32, 42 servers in a rack.

11:37 If every tenant get one server, you have maximum 42 tenants.

11:41 This is rough math.

11:42 You can provide these functions inline and distributed manner.

11:46 That's the industry game-changer.

11:48 None of the vendors are doing it.

11:50 We're talking to a few vendors including Juniper to build something

11:54 that can give us huge scale for this edge platform data center.

11:58 Security, I feel is a huge progress if you can make in inline manner.

12:05 Second is, as I told you, building the self-driven network.

12:09 It is NorthStar.

12:10 You can go step by step.

12:12 As I told you, the challenges are brownfield and greenfield.

12:15 It is just not greenfield.

12:17 Greenfield, it's pretty easy to build these--

12:20 -Everything is new.

12:21 -Exactly right.

12:22 I have 80% of my network brownfield.

12:26 Now, I have legacy tools, legacy SNMP with new streaming telemetry.

12:31 Then if you have to sample the traffic, there are S flow, J flow.

12:35 Every vendor has their own flavor of software.

12:37 Building that data lake with all of these technologies as a plugin,

12:42 and then running this ML and AI algorithm,

12:45 which based on the rich data set will give you a correct information

12:49 and more accurate self-driving approach to the networks.

12:52 As I talked previously as well, getting an application SLA and

12:56 implementing it and taking customer traffic, putting it into right slice

13:00 in the network is an easy job, but what happened when failure happened?

13:03 This is where the self-driven network,

13:05 finding what's the problem your network,

13:08 how do we see the traffic to the next best available link by also meeting

13:12 the customer SLA is a critical thing.

13:14 I feel like much towards the self-driven network, which involves building

13:18 these data lakes, multi-vendor, multi-protocol, multi encoding,

13:22 multi plugin, and then inline security firewalls, IPS/IDS load balancers

13:29 will be a game-changer for data centers.

13:32 -Md., Thank you Very much for your time today.

13:35 I really appreciate your insights.

13:38 Some of the takeaways I took from these

13:40 conversations are very important.

13:41 First of all, we must provide APIs.

13:44 We should have support for open data lake

13:47 that can support telemetry coming in from multiple vendors.

13:51 We should have inline security, layer 4, layer 7,

13:54 even at the top of the rack switches

13:56 so that each customer can be supported separately.

13:59 Finally, the vision of self-driving networks

14:02 should also be applied to brownfield networks,

14:05 not just greenfield networks.

14:07 With that, thank you again.

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