Surviving in the Era of Exponential Data

Data centers are everywhere. They are the backbone of communications and commerce for billions of people and trillions in transactions, everyday. And within the data center from storage, to processing, to virtualization, nearly every technology has undergone tremendous evolution, introducing more efficiency, speed, reliability and capability in the process. In comparison, the network has remained unchanged for nearly a decade, with legacy vendors simply adding more boxes in pursuit of bandwidth and scale.

Also, the demands placed on data center are rising exponentially and are now beyond what the current architectural approach can support by every measure.

From a demand for processing to an increase in security threats to the need for a reduction in operational costs and energy consumption, data center is now exponential and with it comes the need for solutions to handle this difficult reality.

In response to this challenge, virtualization has long been regarded as a silver bullet for nearly every issue in the data center. Through virtualization, processing and storage resources within the data center can be used more efficiently and dynamically, enabling resource allocation to become automated in the cloud.

The trouble is that while servers and storage systems have evolved to fit comfortably into the virtual world, the network which connects all the other data center resources together, has failed to evolve at the same rate. Legacy data center networks inhibit virtual machine mobility and their inherent complexity makes it difficult to build larger, more efficient clouds.

Also what is noteworthy is that while virtualization has been adopted as the rallying call in data center design and there have been a number of innovations delivered that have dramatically improved the situation, their ability to improve efficiency is only as capable as the network allows.

The traditional approach to dealing with growing network demands, is to simply grow the data center. The result is an unmanageable infrastructure that will lack mission critical functionalities.

The solution is a single plain architecture that produces 'any to any' availability of data center resources. Network simplicity breeds flexibility and long-term cost stability.

It is generally agreed that reducing conventional multi-layer networks to a flat network switching 'fabric' is the way forward but so far implementations of this concept have fallen short of the mark.

Network vendors have been attempting to build data center fabrics using their existing ethernet switching components, but instead of focusing on the network, the focus has largely been on switches.

The need is to build a network that is flat, single-layered and is a simpler and more correct path to solve the most difficult of network problems.

That the solution should be a flat fabric is a given. That it should adhere to network standards and not change the way applications, servers, storage, and other infrastructure components connect to the network is also a given. The brilliance actually lies in the inherent simplification of the network:

• Push the intelligence to the edge of the fabric
• Minimize the amount of processing and hardware required to transport data across the fabric while maintaining any-to-any connectivity
• Enable the fabric to scale from tens of ports to thousands or even tens of thousands of ports while maintaining the simplest and most proven operational model that of a single switch.

A product which is focused on delivering the next-generation data center will bring in the performance and operational simplicity of a single switch while delivering the scale and resilience of a network. Fabrics engineered on this need of simplifying the network should be smarter and provide more powerful networking technology. It should deliver a quantum change in the total cost of ownership, remove the complexity associated with legacy networks and provide a clean sheet approach and foundation for building data centers for the next decade.

Sridhar Sarathy
The author is vice-president, India operations, Juniper Networks, India
vadmail@cybermedia.co.in