DATA CENTRE PREDICTIONS
construct. Whereas Chongqing in China can
boast a population over 30 million people,
this city contains around 200 million ‘waste
heaps’ created by a population that is simply
incalculable – because it is a city of termites
covering an area almost as big as Britain.
Its mounds – up to 2.5 metres tall and nine
metres wide – are not separate colonies,
but waste heaps totalling some 2.4 cubic
miles of soil, carried grain by grain to
the surface by individual termites when
excavating the tunnels of one massive
underground city estimated to go back
more than four thousand years.
An individual termite’s ability to navigate
obstacles is on a par with today’s best
robots, in a body weighing just a few
milligrams – impressive, but very limited
and specialised compared with human
intelligence. But we should really compare
that lone termite to a single human cell –
for real intelligence only emerges in the
entire human, or termite colony.
What can be learnt from this amazing
emergent intelligence? Although today’s
data centres are dwarfed by that termite
city, they face a similar challenge: how
to integrate a vast and complex set of
parts into one highly functional and
efficient whole?
trend today to make the network itself
more intelligent, involves installing ‘smart’
network cards called SmartNICs.
According to Michael Kagan, CTO
Mellanox Technologies: “It’s not just about
how fast you move the data along the
wires. The secret is to process the data
while it moves. In our most advanced
network products we have computational
units within every switch, so we can do
data aggregation on the fly.”
Trend 2 – Faster storage
The revolution of storage capability is well
advanced, with flash solid state storage
revenue exceeding sales in traditional disk
hard drives and the arrival of integrated
single chip storage controllers.
While massive archives will remain on
traditional lower cost media for many
years, as solid-state storage becomes
cheaper it is increasingly first choice for
high speed access.
Again, intelligent networks have a role
to play, as Kagan explains: “SmartNIC
virtualisation presents anything on your
cloud as a true local device. On your
machine with its legacy operating system,
you see a local device that can touch
everything. We can allocate resources
from different machines on the network
and make them available as local storage
devices, or local storage services on the
local machine.”
Faster storage also needs faster networks…
Trend 3 – Faster networks
Michael Kagan, CTO Mellanox
Technologies
Trend 1 – A smarter network
There are many elements to building a
smart network but the focus here is on
NICs. In a traditional data centre the
servers centralise the intelligence, one
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Issue 08
High speed Ethernet (25G and faster)
went mainstream last year. It is no longer
just the privilege of hyperscale giants
as more medium sized enterprises are
upgrading from 10G to 40G Ethernet and
finding up to 50-fold performance gains
from more efficient use of resources.
The hyperscalers are still leading the
trend, however. One giant social media
company, upgrading to cutting-edge Rome
generation servers, found that its 25Gb/s
networks were no longer sufficient and
jumped to 100Gb/s Ethernet to get the full
performance benefits.
Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice President,
Marketing, at Mellanox Technologies
According to Kevin Deierling, Senior Vice
President, Marketing, at Mellanox: “This
is the perpetual game of technology leap-
frog. Whenever there is a leap forward in
one element of the processing-storage-
network triad, another element falls
behind. With the newest CPUs making big
performance leaps, it’s now the network’s
turn to leap.”
Trend 4 – Intent-based
networking (IBN)
IT historically developed from the
bottom up: from lengthy, unintelligible
machine code, through a hierarchy of
ever higher-level languages, to today:
when a single screen swipe conveys our
‘intent’ to erase a file.
IBN takes networking that way. In the case
of an enterprise network, the business
intent might be to accelerate the system’s
response to customers.
We are a long way from systems that
could respond to such a human intent,
but we do have network managers that
can distil the business desire into a
realistic interpretation of that intent in
IT terms.
It might boil down to a more technical
description, such as: “We must deploy
an EVPN leaf/spine network to support
our enterprise application, as well as
the policies required for the various
application tiers and the specific SLAs for
that application, which include latency and
packet loss requirements.”
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