With 34 percent of the world’s population, more than 2.5 billion people, enjoying access to the internet and businesses increasingly relying on IP-based voice and video communications as well as cloud-services, demands being placed on today’s data centres are immense. Unfortunately many of the data centres that exist today are based on 20-year old technologies. They can no longer keep up with the demand they are being placed under to the point where businesses are falling behind the requirements needed to adopt new innovations like virtualisation and cloud computing – which require greater network agility and performance from the underlying network in order to operate effectively.
Brocade’s recent research found that two thirds of businesses are experiencing multiple outages each week, resulting in data and revenue loss, and causing some to fall short of customer’s service level agreements. When you look at the news agenda, large scale outages happen with striking regularity. With 20 year old technology, companies are struggling to deal with surges in demand and it is resulting in damage to both the business’ bottom line and its reputation.
So what are the options for enterprises?
The simple truth is that businesses have to go through a dramatic change to meet the continuously changing and unique networking requirements needed to adopt technology like virtualisation and cloud computing that are designed to prevent these outages.
Business operations, planning and competitiveness have never been so reliant on corporate IT infrastructure and so the requirement for a resilient yet agile, high performance network is only going to become more important.
Enterprises need to be looking at their infrastructure now, rather than simply sitting tight and hoping these major outages do not occur.
Data centre of the future – the "On-Demand" Data Centre
A new approach is required for the data centre; one that represents another major evolution in networking towards a highly virtualised, open and flexible network infrastructure and one that evolves with new technologies and practices (such as Software Defined Networking). With an infrastructure that combines physical and virtual networking elements, enterprises can provision the capacity – compute, network, storage and services – they require to deliver high-value applications faster and easier than the legacy data centre networks they are using today.
How can enterprises begin to make the transition to the data centre of the future? There are a few key steps to consider:
1. Solid foundations
At the heart of any data centre is the physical networking infrastructure, one that provides the connectivity between applications, servers and storage. However, not all networking infrastructures are equal and for businesses that want to embrace a highly flexible and agile on-demand model – a fabric-based networking topology is required. A fabric-based network, both at the IP and storage layers, will simplify network design and management to address the growing complexity in IT and data centres today, and deliver key features like logical chassis, distributed intelligence and automated port profile migration. This provides the ideal hardware foundation for the On-Demand Data Centre.
2. Virtual infrastructure
On top of the physical infrastructure will be a virtual or logical layer. The same concepts are now being applied to storage and IP networks with technologies such as overlay networks enabled through a variety of tunneling techniques. Next we will see network services virtualised, thanks to the introduction of virtual switches and routers. Network Function Virtualisation represents an industry movement towards software or VM-based form factors for common data centre services. Customers want to realise the cost and flexibility advantages of software rather than continuing to deploy specialised, purpose-built devices for services such as application delivery controllers. This is the case in cloud architectures where these services need to be commissioned and decommissioned with mouse clicks rather than physical hardware installations and moves.
3. Controllers
In addition to the physical and virtual or logical layer will be controllers (for the network, servers and data storage). One example is the network controller, which is implemented in software and tracks the status of the network and provides well-defined KPIs. The complete architecture is built around applications that directly affect the underlying infrastructure and guarantees the best possible application uptime, performance and security.
4. Orchestration frameworks
Finally, the entire data centre environment must be managed by orchestration frameworks that allow for the rapid and end-to-end provisioning of virtual data centres. Approaches like OpenStack, for example, allows customers to deploy network capacity and services in their cloud-based data centres far quicker than with legacy network architectures and provisioning tools.
The data centre of the future will be a combination of the most valuable aspects of the physical and virtual layers. Such a data centre will give organisations the ability to flexibly deploy data centre capacity – compute, networking, storage and services – in real-time, whenever and wherever they need it.
