networking ICT F
rom the executive perspective, IT represents opportunity. Unfortunately that can simply be an opportunity to reduce expenses within the function itself, or for the more strategic and broader thinking executive, IT represents a catalyst to create a more agile, nimble and responsive organisation. The promise of ‘the cloud’ includes the opportunity for the CIO to become a ‘resource broker’ rather than an infrastructure owner. Someone that ‘purchases computational capacity’ when it is needed and for as long as it is needed. The CIO is able to move applications, processing and computational capacity from within the four walls of the enterprise to a lower cost venue as the opportunity presents itself.
And from the business perspective, the volume of real-time information is exploding.
Video enabled business creates the opportunity to educate, to communicate and to ‘brand’ organisations around the globe. The ability to transact business from anywhere, on a multitude of devices, creates powerful organisational flexibility that opens the door to new markets, new regions and new revenue.
Although many applications, systems, devices or vendors may claim the fame associated with enabling one or more of these exciting changes, the fundamental enabler of all this change is the network. The network connects a multitude of user devices to the resources that they need (and on many occasions, two or three devices per user) - it connects the enterprise to its partner, customers and service providers, and it provides the enabling force that allows the vision of the cloud to be realised. The network is also scaling to accommodate the explosive growth in the volume of information that is being moved from source to destination.
Over 20 hours of new video is loaded onto YouTube each minute; over 1.3 billion Gigabytes of information is sent across mobile devices each month; 11 billion web searches are executed each month in the US alone. Incredible metrics by any standard, and may be easy to dismiss because the enterprise growth and demand may be fundamentally smaller, but the pace of change and the adoption of new communications is absolutely a proxy for the expectations of users within the enterprise.
So how is the network responding to these new opportunities and challenges? It is evolving and accelerating.
Networks are becoming flatter and simpler in architecture. The days of many tiers within a network topology are behind us and the flatter, lower latency and lower overhead network architectures are being adopted in the core of the network. The driving force behind ‘flattening the network’ is to reduce the number of ’hops’ or transit points that information traverses in its path from the source system to the destination device. Fewer ’hops’ means faster transit, and faster transit means faster ’request to response’ from the end user perspective.
In parallel with this change, the ‘core’ of the network is moving into the data centre. Some could argue that it has always been there, but there are many architectural diagrams
that have the network core as an abstracted entity at the ‘top of the topological pyramid’ where clients and servers had similar status at the bottom of the branches. The core of the network now is responding to the fact that enterprise compute is gravitating back to the core of the data centre as devices look to extract data from many remote sources, and increasingly less from local storage. The ‘connected world’ is enabling the client device to become thinner and thinner and yet its need to reach into the core of the enterprise or the core of the cloud is rapidly increasing.
The raw speed of the network is also increasing. The transition from 100Mb to 1Gb was reasonably fast for servers, but somewhat slower for edge devices as the arrival of wireless technology for the edge cannibalised the need for wired connectivity to a degree. However, in 2011 and even more so in 2012, the server will be driving 10Gb connectivity demands in data centres, which will in turn drive network backbones from 10Gb (or multiples of 10Gb) to 40Gb and to the promised 100Gb.
Flatter. Faster. Broader. A lot of change for the network
However with all this change, the demands to manage, maintain, monitor and secure the network continue to increase. Whether the driving force for these amplifying demands is compliance to new standards and requirements, expectations for 100% availability or the ever present need to secure and protect the enterprise, the need to understand the network status and behaviour has become a critical factor for many IT organisations. The world of the past with tactical and reactive response is simply not going to scale and a new approach to establishing and maintaining visibility to the network itself and to the traffic that it carries, is required.
A new architectural approach is being adopted to address this challenge by enterprises, governments and telecommunication service providers around the globe. At the heart of the new topology is a ’Visibility Fabric’ – an intelligent layer that exists on top of the network itself, that extracts replicas of the traffic traversing the network without impacting the production network or traffic in anyway. The replicas of the traffic are evaluated and their relevance for specific monitoring, management and security events considered, before they are forwarded onto the appropriate ’network system’. For example, millions of packets moved across thousands of connections, and traversing hundreds of physical network links, is far too broad and demanding for any management system to monitor effectively, but with a Visibility Fabric in place, specific information flows can be extracted and sent to a network management device to provide a health signature of the network. From within the millions of packets that carry video on the network, the voice-over-IP packets can be extracted and sent to a recording device to ensure compliance with industry standards. Or from a 100% utilised 40Gb connection, the 10 packets that originate on a specific web server can be extracted and forwarded to the Application Performance Management system.
As the network scales in every dimension and the demands for management, monitoring and security continue to increase, the Visibility Fabric provides an innovative, flexible and agile solution to address these two – and sometimes conflicting – changes.
March 2012 I
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