Friday, April 25, 2014

A Network Fabric for New Applications in the Data Center

The Network Challenge with Deploying Applications
Thanks to virtualization organizations can bring up new applications and services quickly. Unfortunately, many data center networks don’t let you fully capitalize on the business agility that virtualization and modern application architectures provide. Traditional network architectures are too slow and too cumbersome to configure. For true agility, enterprises need a high-performance, low-latency fabric network that can be managed like a single, logical switch.

Today’s mid-sized and large-scale data centers are built with high-performance blade and rack servers, which typically run multiple VMs, which in turn run increasingly modular, web- and cloud-based applications. These modern applications are driving increased traffic levels and different traffic patterns, which place specific demands on the data center network.Critical business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) are divided into multiple modules. As a result, relatively simple operations such as entering an order can trigger 100 or more individual transactions, each imposing its own latency. Some applications, including eCommerce applications, even behave dynamically, spinning up new instances or migrating workloads in response to traffic loads.

Their distributed nature means modern applications are spread across racks of servers, each served by multiple switches. The applications generate a tremendous amount of server-to-server, or east-west, traffic as the various modules communicate with one another. Multi-tier network architectures aren’t well matched to modern applications. They force this east-west traffic to first travel north and south, up and down the network tree, before arriving at its ultimate destination, adding significant latency that can cause application performance to degrade under load.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Design Your Network For Virtualized, SDN Enabled Applications in the Cloud

Applications are Driving Change
Organizations are going through a transition in how they build network infrastructure. This is because the number and type of applications in use is growing rapidly. The way that applications are accessed is changing and so is the way that they are designed.

Organizations are hosting applications in their own data centers. They are extending their applications across data centers. They are accessing applications from cloud hosting providers. Service providers are hosting applications on behalf of the enterprise and providing application management services.

These new applications are complex and they are virtualized and many of newer ones are SDN enabled. Many applications are used in multiple geographies and workloads follow the sun. All of this is changing how applications need to be delivered and how the network needs to be build to serve them.

Challenges with Deploying Applications
There are 3 major that you need to address to deploy new applications effectively. These are virtualization, SDN and cloud.

Modern applications are virtualized and dynamic. They communicate internally to a great degree and they move workloads around the network. This means that you need network fabric with mesh connectivity for them to perform properly.

Many new applications are SDN enabled and their component parts are connected via a virtualized overlay network, however these applications need to communicate with existing infrastructure so you need a way to incorporate SDN enabled applications into the rest of the infrastructure.