Building networks of the future

Advancements in technology over the past decade have been so rapid that devices that generate process, transmit and store data are now cheaper and more accessible than ever before. Smart, internet-enabled devices have penetrated every aspect of everyday life and their numbers are only set to rise.

Research firm IDATE predicts that eighty billion things will be connected to the internet by 2020, leading to a phase that industry experts have termed as the 'Internet of Things'. This trend, coupled with the exponentially growing volumes of traffic from traditional sources will require a fresh set of network investments.

Samer Ismair, MEMA Network Consultant at Brocade Communications says that with the Internet of Things now an imminent reality, Middle East network providers have their work cut out for them. It is an opportunity, despite one that entails significant challenges. As promising new technologies continue to emerge, regional network operators must meticulously plan their investments in order to build the high-performance, future-proof networks of the tomorrow.

As a first step, organizations in the Middle East that have not done so already, must consider virtualization. Now the de facto industry standard, virtualization brings the uncontrolled growth of hardware in the data center to a halt. By virtualizing servers and applications, and adapting their network topologies accordingly, companies can improve performance in the data centers without bearing cost overheads.

Mobile and cloud services have increased reliability and scalability requirements of the data center and virtualization addresses these issues too. But to effectively build, expand and monitor virtualized networks, operators must closely examine the physical, virtual and control layers of their infrastructures.

Requirements of the on-demand data center

With consumers increasingly subscribing to on-demand services, data center requirements have evolved. In addition to being the solid base which provides physical connectivity between applications, servers, and storage, the data center is now the epicenter of IT innovation.

For organizations looking for greater flexibility in their data centers, fabric network topology is essential. Compared to classic hierarchical ethernet architectures, ethernet fabrics provide higher levels of performance, utilization, availability, and simplicity. A fabric approach is also far more suitable for working with highly virtualized data centers.

On top of the physical infrastructure lies the virtual or logical layer. This has been widely utilized in the server domain with hypervisor technology. With new requirements, there is need to adapt these concepts in the IP network and storage domains as well such as through the introduction of virtual switches and routers.

Using Network Function Virtualization (NFV) operators can leverage a virtualized solution to improve the efficiency of their routing and switching. Also, as there is little or no special hardware required, there are major cost benefits too.

In the third layer are the controllers for the network, servers and data storage, which monitor the status of the data center components based on pre-defined KPIs. The entire management is possible with orchestration frameworks such as OpenStack.

It is an open-source software that delivers a massively scalable cloud operating system designed to enable end-to-end data center orchestration. OpenStack not only supports business objectives, but also creates a foundation for growth, ongoing flexibility, and innovation

Data center in a box

The data center of the future, that is capable of supporting the Internet of Things without huge management or cost implications, will require the optimal combination of physical and virtual elements. The virtual layer will continue to grow in importance as increasing demands are placed on the three core functions in the data center - compute , storage and network.

This brings the 'data center in a box' concept within reach: a 1U appliance that can be customized with any type of functionality or combination thereof. An organization that successfully fills this with applications, storage and a virtual router will create easy virtual LANs and thus support secure and reliable multi-tenancy in its data center. And this is exactly what will be needed.

It is clear that networks of the future will require significant investments in the physical, virtual and control planes of the network of today. The Internet of Things is not an "if" but rather a "when" proposition. Its development and success will depend on the commitment and foresight of network operators. Smart investment and future ready infrastructures will be the cornerstone of this evolution!

First published in CIOL