Preparing for the Cloud

The Indian cloud computing market will continue to grow and reach $16 bn by 2020, says a study, ‘Deconstructing the Cloud', by software industry body NASSCOM, in association with Deloitte.

In addition, because India is a major communication hub with several submarine cables, intercontinental traffic to and from India will continue to grow exponentially, especially as global cloud services adoption increases.

To help manage the growing traffic, network operators are using coherent-based optical transport and intelligent mesh networks to facilitate the interconnections of global points of presences, which include large data centers.

But, what would happen inside the enterprises? What can IT leaders do to prepare for the anticipated growth in cloud computing?

Evolving to Support the Cloud

Enterprises must consider the network that connects the data centers and how these inter-data center networks must evolve to support new cloud use cases and associated network requirements for bandwidth scalability, low latency, security, virtualization, and automation.

Early steps towards commercialization of cloud-based services in India appear encouragingly successful. In fact, Symantec's State of Information Survey-Digital Information Index-found that 37% of organizations in India store business information in private clouds.

To set an example, Tata Communication's InstaCompute cloud service in India enables enterprises to leverage Tata's globally available cloud services.

As Indian enterprises grow more comfortable storing data in the cloud, they will also look to the cloud for larger, business critical data initiatives, such as disaster recovery, workload migration and virtualization.

The reason for this is simple-Indian enterprises have so much time in a day to move their data, and therefore require the right connection and the ability to tune that connection based on their specific needs, right away.

Additionally, many enterprises are generally risk-averse, and often prefer to wait until concerns about speed, data privacy, and security are well addressed to minimize the risk of making a new technology investment.

Need a New Network Approach

As the cloud business evolves from Software-as-a Service applications (SaaS), which transfer small amounts of cloud storage, to Infrastructure Services for more mission critical, larger file size requirements, a standard internet connection will no longer suffice. Instead, we need a different network architecture approach. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) applications like storage, and new applications like Virtual Machine (vm) mobility, are going to require more scalable bandwidth to get large transfers (of the order of Terabytes, common in finance, imaging, medical and other sectors) accomplished in a reasonable amount of time.

The solution appears self-evident when you analyze it in this fashion-what enterprises, who are serious about the cloud for next generation cloud IaaS applications, need is a better, higher capacity cloud backbone.

Cost, another key concern for Indian enterprises, could be addressed by making this bandwidth ‘on-demand' for periodic IaaS use cases, like workload mobility, availability and collaboration, and only billing for the premium bandwidth that is used.

Enterprises are evolving their data centers through consolidation, virtualization, data protection, and taking their first steps into cloud services. Moving costs from less flexible capital expenses to on-demand operating expenses is a strong driver for the uptake of cloud-based data center infrastructure services.

The Move to Virtual Data Centers

This evolution is driving the creation of the virtual data center architecture inter-connected with a cloud backbone network. Multiple data centers can be connected to enable workload orchestration, traffic generation and flow. The physical walls of individual data centers effectively are broken down to create a virtual data center capacity encompassing multiple physical ones-what we at Ciena refer to as a ‘Data Center Without Walls'.

With this network architecture approach, enterprises will be able to access cloud resources anywhere, anytime. Service providers will be able to offer cloud services differentiated by programmable network access, and economies of scale that leverage their data center footprints. Cloud providers will be able to handle uncertain demand requirements and fail over by more efficiently allocating workloads across multiple data centers. This cloud backbone network will be the critical link for providing cost-effective scalability, security, and on-demand services that enable the virtual data center.

While it is inevitable that more and more businesses will use the cloud to send and store data, it is simplistic to assume that preparing the network is just a matter of increasing its capacity for bandwidth. An intelligent cloud network will include:

• A cloud backbone network that provides assured service performance while minimizing latency and maintaining a consistent high-level operation-at the optimum cost

• Performance on-demand to efficiently accommodate variable and unpredictable traffic loads

• Network ‘hypervisor'-a management software that will align network resources between data centers for improved economics and application performance

As the ‘Data Center Without Walls' concept matures for workload orchestration, the distinction between the enterprise and cloud data centers will continue to blur, allowing enterprises to interconnect cloud resources with greater efficiency and performance.