DATA CENTRE PREDICTIONS
approach, organisations are limited to the
biggest box available at the time. And if
the monster switch they bought isn’t big
enough, they then have to rip it out and
replace it, which translates into downtime.
Instead of buying a large, high-capacity
switch, you can combine multiple smaller
switches to get the performance you
could get from one large switch. This is
called scaling out or scaling horizontally.
The advantage of this is that you aren’t
limited by the power of a single switch.
As your needs grow, you can add more
smaller switches and they’ll all work
together to share the load. A happy
consequence of scaling out is that you
limit the size of your failure domains.
If one small switch out of dozens fails,
the impact is small. If it has redundant
connections, the impact may be minimal –
just a temporary drop in performance.
As one might expect, cloud providers
use the scaling out approach to achieve
performance, reliability and agility at a
massive scale. If an organisation is serious
about Digital Transformation, its network
has to use the same approach.
The pursuit of fully
automated configurations
Today, there is unprecedented pressure
on the data centre network to not
only scale and remain performant,
but also gain far greater agility and
flexibility through extensive automation
of the entire network life cycle, from
provisioning and deployment to day-
to-day management and upgrades. As
the network grows and becomes more
complex, manual configurations become
increasingly time-consuming, difficult
and risky. Automation is therefore a key
piece of the scalability puzzle.
To make the network fast and agile, your
operating system needs to support open
source automation tools like Ansible,
Chef and Puppet. Your networking team
needs the freedom to craft customised
automation solutions that meet
organisational objectives.
Staying on top of the health of
data centre networks
Combined with the threat of network
outages, the widespread adoption of
microservices, containers and virtual
machines has added a new layer of
complexity in the data centre, resulting in a
strain on traditional networks and the need
to achieve operational simplicity. When an
issue arises, organisations are forced to
go hunting for the proverbial needle in the
haystack, implementing a manual, box-to-
box intervention because they don’t have
a holistic view of all the activities putting
demands on the network.
In order to ensure the data centre network
is behaving as intended, obtaining a
holistic view of the network is critical.
This translates into the ability to collect
data, analyse it and visualise it in real
time in order to obtain actionable insights
and effectively manage the data centre
network. CEOs are increasingly viewing
infrastructure as a strategic resource to
their business and having a direct view
across the network enables teams to
prevent outages achieving an even greater
ROI from their data centre.
The benefits of challenging the
networking status quo
Enterprises in all vertical markets and
geographies are finding that change
is inevitable in the era of Digital
Transformation. This is especially true
in the data centre, where architectures,
infrastructure, people and processes must
go hand-in-hand with increased IT and
operational efficiencies, faster provisioning
of resources, improved network
management and troubleshooting. All of
this needs to happen within the context of
faster time to market and better alignment
of IT teams with the business outcomes
that matter most to the organisations that
employ them.
Fortunately, IT transformation initiatives
provide enterprises with the opportunity
to reassess network architectures and
operational models in light of the need for
a modernised approach to IT. In the sphere
of networking, that means implementing
practices that heavily emphasise
automation, flexibility and scalability to
deliver operational agility and efficiency
gains, which would ultimately translate
into increased revenue and overall
organisational success. ◊
Unfortunately, the tight coupling
of hardware and software limits
organisations’ automation choices.
A proprietary network operating
system means either using proprietary
automation software or, as this is a closed
environment, using an API to stitch it
all together. Again, the ‘one size fits all’
mentality prevents an organisation from
achieving its Digital Transformation goals.
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Issue 05
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