CLOUD COMPUTING
Does the cloud represent the future of IT? Cloud: the next phase By Russel Ridgley, Head of Cloud Services, Pulsant
Intro If you take the view - as many in the industry are at the moment - that everything is moving to the cloud, a great deal of focus will have to be placed on bolstering the networks that support these virtualised environments. Russel Ridgley from Pulsant discusses what the future of networking looks like...
As cloud hosting matures and
Russel Ridgley argues the case for resilient cloud networking…
continues to deliver benefits to organisations, the key remaining issue is that virtualisation technology tends to address only its own network needs and can actually lead to complicating connecting in to the platform. It is only recently that the industry has seen any real advancement in broadening network technologies to ease access into and out of the cloud. The larger technology companies
that are leading in the public cloud space have been addressing these problems themselves by adding supporting services onto their stacks. Smaller service providers, however, continue to struggle as they are relying on technology vendors to package and deliver that functionality, as they don’t have the resources or budget to develop it themselves. At the moment the majority of cloud services depend on the same thing– the
Internet. Though this is a simple model for many it does pose certain challenges in the enterprise as there is no easy way to maintain complete visibility over the network servicing their users. Nor are there any performance
guarantees of end-to-end connectivity due to the sheer numbers of networks that are passed through. Such organisations usually seek
to deploy their own networking to connect their users to their services but commonly have to submit that some cloud services just aren’t reachable by such means as the technology available, to date, hasn’t made such connectivity that easy.
Virtualisation So, although the virtualisation technologies enable you to build virtual networks and create a data centre in a couple of physical servers, in a virtual world, doing so can actually just move a headache rather than cure it. Technology vendors trying to
bridge this gap currently show two distinct strategies. New tech vendors are attacking the underlying cloud platform networking head on with specific, targeted technologies to make their significant scale so much easier, whilst other vendors are extending their existing networking lines to include understanding of the new virtual world. The first approach, probably
the more advanced in terms of development, focuses on creating very large cloud hosting platforms with the option to add services by tying in the more traditional connectivity methods normally via the concept of a gateway. The advantage of this approach is
that the platform can essentially be plugged in with minimal integration required. The downside, however, is that cloud service providers may find themselves with effectively two networks to maintain: one providing their Internet and connectivity and the other underpinning their cloud.
The Cloud: all lit up 28 NETCOMMS europe Volume IV Issue 3 2014
Immediate benefits In the short-term this approach can be deployed to bring immediate benefits to
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clients. The big risk amongst technology vendors is that they are targeting the single purpose. Although they are ahead in the
development cycle, these types of organistaions are generally smaller players in the sense of the broader market and as the other approach develops, these companies could lose market share to the bigger organisations with more resources behind development plans and a broader, and more complete offering. The second approach, developing
network technologies that support virtual networking, is one favoured by the major players in the networking industry. Instead of delivering a network that is designed to just run virtual platforms, the proponents of this approach have developed a network technology that understands cloud hosting networking and supports this natively inside the physical network. In effect, the platform seems
virtual networks as no different from traditional physical links. This is a particularly beneficial option for CSPs (Communication Service Providers) that deliver a broad range of services that is colocation, cloud, managed hosting, etc. This option is almost the natural
evolution of large data centre networks, the new network would form a corner of the existing network and gradually be grown as the old network is phased out, gaining functionality for virtual networking as the network naturally grows. This single technology that delivers
all the needed functionality and requires little additional skill-set would, again, be particularly beneficial for the CSP that offers customers a variety of services, including hybrid options. Ultimately CSPs are looking for
technology partners that can offer them wider virtual network capability. The choice of the targeted versus the broad approach then comes down to the CSP itself and the type of services it offers and the requirements of its customers.
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