Simplifying the Network is the Key to Improving Application Performance

In order ensure application performance and increase productivity across the organization while trying to keep budgets under control Enterprise organizations have been increasingly evaluating and implementing a series of new technologies for the past few years. These technologies hold out the promise of increasing the agility of new application rollouts that deliver game changing services, and meeting the needs of the organization to understand the business and make timely and well informed decisions as well as meeting the changing needs of the organization as they adapt to moves, consolidations and mergers.

The first one of these technologies is server virtualization which is now reaching the middle of the bell curve of the adoption cycle with more than half of organizations at the pervasive or fully virtualized stage according to IDG. The next is cloud computing where investments are up over last year, and the year before, with private cloud now as the preferred model over public cloud. Lowering TCO is a top selling point for both private & public cloud. Cloud solves challenges around business continuity and disaster recovery by providing resources on demand, often in a pay as you go model. It also becomes more popular as organizations begin to see it as an alternative to large capital expenditures for infrastructure.

The Network Needs to Keep up with Change
These solutions, however, won’t have the desired effect unless the underlying technology that ties everything together keeps up with the changing requirements of the organization. That technology is of course the network. Many organizations see network complexity as a barrier to increasing virtualization and realizing the benefits that it brings in terms of better resource utilization, increase performance and lower expenditures. Virtualization takes many forms beyond server virtualization, including storage virtualization, application virtualization, and even network virtualization.

It is the last area, network virtualization, that holds the most promise for benefiting the organization but it is also one that presents the biggest challenges. Many organizations are finding that they need to change the IT organizational structure to in order to accelerate the deployment virtualization and the adoption of cloud within the Enterprise. This can mean making changes to time honored relational structures such as consolidating IT team to eliminate silos across networking, storage, server, and application teams. It will also mean evaluating new technologies such as SDN which holds out the promise to radically transform how networks are provisioned. According to IDG more than one-half of organizations will evaluate SDN within the next two years. It won’t be easy though and many barriers have been identified, including skills gaps, the need for integration with current technology, and the possibility of disruption to the business and of course the need to show a return on investment. One consideration that won’t go away is that of network security and the need to make it a part of any changes to infrastructure when implementing new network technology.

VMware's NSX is a New Model for Networking
A leading technology in the network virtualization space is VMware’s NSX, a virtual overlay network that claims to deliver the operational model of a VM for the network and to transform data center operations and economics. In this model network infrastructure is virtualized and delivered as a service, and the control of the data center is entirely automated by software. This technology holds the promise to increase the rate of innovation and business transformation by increasing network agility in the support of business critical applications. Juniper Networks has worked closely with VMware to ensure the success of this exciting new SDN technology by providing the means to connect the virtual & physical networking world so that applications have access to resources and users have access to applications no matter where they are or how they are connected or what form factor they are in. Juniper provides networking infrastructure, virtual to physical network integration and management resources that enable the move to network virtualization.

To Learn More
To learn more about the trends and challenges that organization are facing and how innovations networking will help you succeed join IDG and Juniper Networks for a live webinar on September 26th for insights into how you can remove the network as the barrier to reaching your business goals through the integration of VMware’s NSX with Juniper networking platforms. Click this link to register, Improving Data Center Application Performance and Agility.