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FEATURE DATA CENTRES


says Terpstra, describing Plexxi’s approach as an ‘underlay that is overlay-aware’. Plexxi says applications have certain patterns:


some require low latency, others high bandwidth. Plexxi’s system extracts information from Openstack or from the network virtualisation platform if used. Using information regarding the applications and where they reside, it can calculate the likely points in the network where high bandwidth and low latency are needed. ‘We can look at what is the network you need and we will adjust how the network is constructed; where those wavelengths go from one switch to another based on need,’ says Terpstra. Te fact that industry is responding to the


networking challenge is no bad thing, argues Brad Casemore, research director, data centre networks at market research firm IDC. ‘What we are seeing is a real variation of needs and requirements across the customer spectrum,’ he says. Te hyperscale data centre operators run


networks to confer competitive advantage. Tis has led them to explore commodity ‘white-box’ switches and SDN, and to a degree network virtualisation. ‘All want a flexible, adaptable networking model that closely conjoins to the


application workloads,’ says Casemore. ‘Tese hyperscale players have the impetus and the skills to do things differently.’ In contrast, cloud service providers need isolated


workloads for their multiple tenants, using virtualised servers. Tey want networking that


The hyperscale data centre operators run networks to confer competitive advantage


supports their business models, and network virtualisation technology is a natural fit. Enterprises form a much broader spectrum, but


can be split between large players and the rest. Large enterprises, such as financial services players, have IT requirements spread across multiple data centres. As such, they share the characteristics of the hyperscale internet players. But the remaining enterprises, where IT is not their primary business but a critical support, have IT staff with more


limited skill sets. And it is this broader enterprise segment where Cisco believes it can largely retain with its ACI model, says Casemore. Te industry consensus is that while the market


will shape which of the main approaches will succeed in the coming years, the concept of SDN and the controller is here to stay. Another such development, not strictly related to SDN, is the separation of hardware and soſtware, dubbed network disaggregation (see box). Will these two trends change the relative roles of


hardware and soſtware? Opinion is mixed. Cisco has demonstrated it will use merchant switch- silicon from Broadcom where it makes sense from a cost-performance standpoint, while using its own silicon to add competitive advantage. Yet Plexxi, despite its optical networking scheme, believes soſtware will become the key differentiator. ‘Hardware is just a tool,’ says Terpstra. ‘Our


differentiator is not so much the hardware, but our maths algorithms’ – the algorithms that take application data from the management layer and calculates the best optical layer configuration.l


Roy Rubenstein is editor of Gazettabyte. www.gazettabyte.com


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