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‘On-Demand’ Strategy will help Middle East Enterprises Build Flexible, Future-Proof Data Centers
Published Jul 15, 2013
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According to IDC, Middle East IT spending in 2013 is projected to cross the $32 billion mark which is double the global average. No doubt a significant portion of this will be spent on technologies that will build the data centers of the future! The connected world of today cares very little for the back-end technology and infrastructure that makes it run, and yet demands so very much of it. At the heart of the communications, applications and service delivery ecosystem is the network that has over the past two decades grown exponentially both in size and complexity. The modern data center is no longer just the silent backbone, endlessly toiling away to keep operations up and running. Businesses now see it as an essential platform for innovation.
Sufian Dweik, regional director, MEMA at Brocade Communications says that the data center that Middle East organizations should deploy will require a new approach that includes a high degree of virtualization, the combination of physical and virtual infrastructure elements and an open standards based approach which will provide the flexibility to evolve as new technologies come into play. One such technology will no doubt be Software Defined Networking (SDN). Middle East organizations are already expressing interest in how this new approach can radically improve their networks.
Brocade believes that scalability and elasticity are among the top criteria for evaluating the success of data center deployments. Accordingly, the company recently unveiled its 'On-Demand' Data Center strategy as a means to achieve this. Sufian Dweik, Regional Director, MEMA at Brocade lists below the key ingredients of a future-proof data center network:
1. Fabric for the Future
At the heart of any data center is the physical networking infrastructure, one that provides the connectivity between applications, servers and storage. However, not all networking infrastructures are equal, and for businesses that want to embrace a highly flexible and agile on-demand model, a fabric-based networking topology is required. One that delivers a blueprint that unifies vital areas of the data center, from Fabrics to storage to physical and virtual infrastructure. A fabric-based network, both at the IP and storage layers, will simplify network design and management to address the growing complexity in IT and data centers today and deliver key features like logical chassis, distributed intelligence and automated port profile migration. Fabric-based networks are more attuned to operate in a highly virtualized data centers to support techniques such as VM mobility within a fabric and across data centers, thereby providing the ideal hardware foundation for the on-demand data center.
2. Virtual Infrastructure
On top of the physical infrastructure will be a virtual or logical layer. This is well-established in the server domain with hypervisor technology. The same concepts are now being applied to both storage and IP networks with technologies such as overlay networks enabled through a variety of tunneling techniques. Next we will see network services virtualized, thanks to the introduction of virtual switches and routers. “NFV”, or Network Function Virtualization, represents an industry movement towards software or VM-based form factors for common data center services. Customers want to realize the cost and flexibility advantages of software rather than continuing to deploy specialized, purpose-built devices for services such as application delivery controllers. This is especially the case in cloud architectures where these services want to be commissioned and decommissioned with mouse clicks rather than physical hardware installations and moves.
3. Controllers
In addition to the physical and virtual/logical layer will be controllers (for the network, servers and data storage). One such example is the network controller, which is implemented in software and tracks the status of the network and provides well-defined KPIs. The complete architecture is built around applications that directly affect the underlying infrastructure and guarantees the best possible application uptime, performance and security.
4. Orchestration frameworks
Finally, the entire data center environment must be managed by orchestration frameworks that allow for the rapid and end-to-end provisioning of virtual data centers. There are many approaches in the market, such as VMware vCloud Director and the OpenStack community. OpenStack, for example, allows customers to deploy network capacity and services in their cloud-based data centers far quicker than with legacy network architectures and provisioning tools.
The data center of the future will therefore be a combination of the most valuable aspects of the physical and virtual layers. Such a data center will give organizations the ability to flexibly deploy data center capacity - compute, networking, storage and services - in real-time, whenever and wherever they need it. Additionally, the simplified management and elastic nature of such a data center design will also deliver much improved ROI (due to scaling, scale multi-tenancy and time and money savings). So, for an organization wanting to make the journey to the On-Demand Data Center, they must look for technology partners that are focused on delivering a network infrastructure than enables this vision.
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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