The explosion in the demands on data centres means that businesses can no longer continue building out data centres as usual and the industry has reached a critical point where a new network topology will usher in greatly enhanced network performance as well as new opportunities to develop software on the new network fabric, according to Juniper, a leader in the networking space.
Adam Judd, Juniper SVP for APAC, speaks of the need to reduce the number of layers in data centres from three down to one because of virtualisation and SOA.
Adam Judd, Senior Vice-President for Asia-Pacific at Juniper said that the networking industry was at an inflexion point, a moment of change that will create significant growth opportunities that does not happen often. Some companies are placing bets around the status quo, around the current network being able to deliver what is needed. Others are looking at commoditisation; that building things bigger and cheaper will be enough. Juniper has placed its bets on innovation - that the problems are so significant and the opportunities are so great that it needs to create something different and sustainable. This is its vision called Stratos of a single converged network and a new open ecosystem to develop software and applications that live in the network.
In 2009 the global economic crisis saw enterprise spending on networks down by 30 to 40 percent, yet Juniper managed to grow its sales, by about 40 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, meaning it took significant market share from the competition.
Data centres have been consolidating and cloud computing and smart phones are driving huge amounts of data across the network.
Judd spoke of many inflexion points in the history of IT. The change from IBM's proprietary mainframe systems to the X86 PC world in the early 1980s is one which led to new companies building software for the open platform; the move to a rich new platform called Windows by a company called Microsoft and the thousands and thousands of applications that emerged is another.
Meanwhile, in networking, the current model is not sustainable and will break soon, he predicted. Mega data centres see more and more machines to machines transactions and the growth of video has not even reached primetime yet. The traditional three-layer model of networks - access, aggregation and core might have been good enough five or 10 years ago, but today it needs a re-think.
In the past, most network traffic goes "north-south" or from the servers out to the Internet to end users. A company's ERP (enterprise resource planning) or CRM (customer relationship management) resides on a server and the users are somewhere else. But technologies such as SOA (service oriented architecture) and virtualisation now mean that most traffic flows east-west as services or virtual machines talk to each other and provide services for others to use. In a modern data centre, only 25 percent of traffic is actually outward facing.
Judd spoke Juniper's 3-2-1 plan. Taking the three layer model down to two today and eventually to one converged mega-switch called Stratos (or to be precise, pair of redundant switches) for the data centre to reduce latency, improve performance and create a new platform for innovation.
For financial companies, 10 milliseconds of latency can deprive them of up to 10 percent of revenue thanks to today's algorithmic trading and hence it was a no-brainer for the NYSE to re-architect its network. The Tokyo stock exchange did the same and today many other stock exchanges are looking at flattening down their networks.
Unlike the competition (Cisco) which has over 40 versions of IOS on its boxes, Juniper says that its one version of Junos and has opened up its API (application programming interface) for developers to write software for it.
Judd likened the opening up of Junospace (the Junos platform) to Apple's iTunes. He said that weeks before the iPhone launch, Jobs was quoted as saying the one thing that Microsoft did well and that Apple did not was build a big partner ecosystem. A couple of weeks later the iTunes store was launched and the rest is history.
Juniper hopes to tap into the best talent in the world to create new applications that run on its ecosystem that now ranges from the data centre right through to the PC, notebook or smart phone running its software.
Away from the big corporations and telecommunication companies, power and utility companies are increasingly talking to Juniper but that is because their huge fibre optic networks now mean they are starting to operate like network companies in their own right.
Matt Kolon, VP of Sales, said that today only 25 percent of a data centre's traffic is out to the end users the rest being "horizontal" traffic between servers. In extreme cases, traffic between two virtual machines on the same physical machine have to travel right out to the edge and come back down again, with very high costs in terms of latency that can be avoided with a simplified network structure.
Telepresence quality is an example of a application that has been developed on the Junospace appstore by Polycom to guarantee bandwidth, latency, jitter and quality of service to ensure a good quality connection for its teleconference equipment without having to resort to expensive, dedicated networks.
Junospace also opens up new marketing opportunities. A healthcare provider can now develop a Junospace app that ensures compliance with data protection laws and push that compliance out to the edge, to the individual laptops and smart phones connected to the network running JunosPulse (software that provides secure access and application acceleration). The company could then sell that unique healthcare solution through Juniper's worldwide network.
Stratus is the name for Juniper's vision of a single-layer converged network. This will be a single flat network that connects everything including storage. Ethernet has evolved so fast that it is now the de facto standard for every type of connection.
Greg Brunt, Enterprise Architect and Regional Director, said that fighting the economics of Ethernet is a losing battle. When Fibre Channel was at 1 GBPS, ethernet was at 100 MBPS. Today Fibre Channel is at 16 GBPS and Ethernet is at 10 GBPS. But the next iteration will see FC double its speed to 32 GBPS but Ethernet will increase 10-fold to 100 GBPS.
About the author
Writer: Don Sambandaraksa
Position: Database Reporter
ที่มา: bangkokpost.com
Topic: A new vision for networking (Read 1626 times)
May 21, 2010, 10:34:37 PM
