Author:
Ken
Cheng, Brocade CTO and VP of Corporate Development and Emerging
Business
A
magician pulls a rabbit from a hat and the audience is captivated by
the spectacle, but the real magic happened behind the scenes—a
sleight of hand. When you stream a movie to your smartphone, it’s
the user experience that likewise captivates. But the real magic
happens in data centers around the world, where more than a petabyte
of information is transferred every minute through an endless
patchwork of servers and endpoints.
The
audience clamors for new tricks, but the magician has grown old.
There’s no doubt we’ve come this far thanks to an IT backbone
built on legacy network architecture, but this brave new world of
tablets, smartphones, and connected everything has outgrown the
network infrastructure that powers it. Increasingly, this is becoming
evident for businesses in their day-to-day operations. Ask your IT
administrator the first word that comes to mind when you say
“network,” and chances are they’ll respond with “bottleneck.”
The
data flowing between data centers today has little in common with the
data of ten years ago. It’s not just the fact that there’s a lot
more of it—it’s gone from thin to rich, usage requirements have
changed from static to dynamic, and connections have shifted from
fixed to mobile. The new normal is driven by expectations of a
constant stream of new services delivered cheaply and on demand.
Traditional network architectures simply are not designed to meet
these needs, and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), telecom carriers,
and enterprise IT departments in Egypt are starting to feel the
pinch.
It’s
clear that something fundamental needs to change if we’re to
continue down the path of innovation that has defined the digital
era.
Keys to the Network of the Future
For decades, data centers have scaled
simply by adding physical capacity. This more or less worked until
recently, albeit with the caveat of huge amounts of waste generated
in the form of server sprawl and underutilized resources. But in the
age of cloud computing and ubiquitous mobility, this model is rapidly
approaching a point of diminishing returns. Sure, you can deploy a 2
TB flash cache to address bottlenecks, but for how long, and is it
really practical in the first place? Can businesses in Egypt afford
to waste resources like this. No, they cannot.
The solutions to the biggest challenges
hampering the data center will require both hardware and software
solutions, not hardware alone—but also a mental shift by the IT
departments themselves.
Many of today’s senior ITDMs cut their
teeth back in the 1990s, when legacy network architectures were first
conceived to fuel a connected world, and often attitudes are still
stuck in this era. However, today’s users need a more agile and
responsive network to support a cloud-based world. As a result, ITDMs
need to change their attitudes, challenge the status quo, and embrace
what users need today. This means adopting a new way of thinking.
Although this is never easy, and not all ITDMs will make the change,
they must do so in order to succeed.
Fabrics, SDN and NFV at the Forefront of
Innovation
For example, IT departments need to
redefine the way data is distributed, and transformational
architecture models like fabric-based networks, Software-Defined
Networking (SDN), and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) are
leading the charge. Fabrics increase network utilization by 200
percent and reduce OpEx by more than 50 percent, while delivering
zero-touch provisioning that radically simplifies network deployment
and improves efficiency. This provides the agile physical foundation
that businesses need to drive change. Like building a house, you
cannot do anything without stable foundations. Fabrics provide this
in the data center, and they enable greater innovation across the
rest of the business.
Together, NFV and SDN are creating highly
automated and more efficiently architected networks that deliver
next-generation apps and services with ease and speed—we’re
talking about deployment in minutes,
not days or weeks!—enabling businesses to stop worrying about how
to deliver their products and services and get back to innovating new
ones.
Often misunderstood, SDN and NFV are
complementary, but not the same. For instance, SDN leverages the
flexibility of new communication protocols like OpenFlow to give
network administrators unprecedented control over the path of network
packets. If network traffic begins to bottleneck, administrators can
redirect the flow to a different switch, and it’s done entirely in
software. Routing rules can be set ad hoc, or they can be entirely
automated through a centralized interface.
NFV,
meanwhile, allows administrators to virtualize core network
functions. Instead of relying on a proprietary device for vital tasks
like firewalling, administrators can offload the function to a
standard x86 server. Virtualized functions can even be deployed in
the cloud.
Future-proofing
Network Architecture
So
how can businesses in Egypt build a platform for innovation in the
data center? One key lesson that can be drawn from the issues
currently plaguing data centers is that it is very difficult to
predict the needs of future products and services. That’s why
networks should consequently be constructed with an eye toward open
standards and interoperability of hardware that provides a blueprint
for innovation.
The
most meaningful benefit of a fabric- and software-based network
architecture is in the long term—the freedom to innovate and the
ability to cost-effectively deliver new applications and services in
minutes instead of days or weeks. But before we can look ahead to
creating new products and services, the likes of which the world has
never seen, we need to do a better job of powering the products and
services we already have. CSPs that began deploying SDN and NFV last
year are already beginning to realize benefits, and carriers as well
as enterprises are expected to begin rolling out SDN and NFV
solutions in 2015.
Breaking
the Network Status Quo
All
of today’s business challenges provide a unique opportunity for IT
departments to be change agents and challenge the status quo. They
need to continually ask “Why?” Why is the business following the
same old strategy of adding boxes to deal with different problems?
Why are we locking ourselves into proprietary standards that inhibit
flexibility and choice? Why are our users bemoaning the ongoing lack
of innovation?
By addressing these questions, IT
departments in Egypt can begin to evolve network architectures to
better meet the needs of today’s applications and services, broaden
the way they can positively impact the business, and lay the
groundwork for products and innovations yet to be imagined. In
essence, they can bring the magic back to the data center.
