Understand and define the architecture targets that are linked to

the services you need to provide to make its business successful.

DATA CENTER

NETWORKING

SOLUTION BRIEF

The data center network has changed very little since the late 1990s, with the exception of faster speeds and some additional protocols and featu-res. Most of the existing networks today are still built based on the same topologies as they always have been, assuming the traffic only flows between the client and server.

However – the boom of server virtualization for the past 15+ years and the move to service-orien-ted architectures have dramatically changed the traffic patterns in the data center. Today, a new virtual server is provisioned and spins up in a matter of minutes and has the capability to move between different physical servers in the data center.

The physical network, still architected the same way since the 1990s is however unable to meet the demand for uniform capacity, performance and availability across the entire data center. The expectation and demand, to be able to deploy business critical applications in minutes rather than months, drive the need to change how networks are built going forward.

At SecureLink, we believe the data center should be viewed as a factory assembly line, parts and components are inserted in one end and at the other end you get a finished product. Data cen-ter networks is analogous to a factory assembly belt that moves parts between different assembly stations. If the assembly belt stops or breaks - the entire production line halts and causes delays and missed revenues.

At the end of the day, data center networks are all about transport efficiency and resilience and if you manage you network with the same mindset as you would a production line, it makes it easier to identify any weaknesses and risks along the line.

To address demands, SecureLink believes it is crucial that data center networks evolve to better suit the workloads of today. The networks of tomorrow will be built using a more predictable, scalable and resilient topology called the “Spine and Leaf”. The Spine and Leaf-topology is better suited to meet the workload demands of today and presents the data center network as Network Fabric, with uniform any-to-any capacity and performance.

SecureLink’s approach to this paradigm shift in the network design is to help our customers under-stand and define their most important architectu-re targets. These targets are linked to the services the customers need to provide to make their business successful.

We believe that first of all you need to define the most crucial services the new data center network should deliver. When that is completed, start the process of creating a high-level design and look at vendor and technology options.

Our mission is to become our customers trusted advisor within network design and data center network implementation, not just another value added reseller following the network vendors’ agenda.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

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TODAY’S CHALLENGESAll organizations have challenges in the data center and these challenges vary between compa-nies but are by and large both technical and non-technical. Technical challenges are not funda-mentally different than they were 15 years ago. The usual pain points are meeting the increa-sing capacity, availability, latency and visibility requirements.

A relatively new challenge is cloud integration, how to utilize public or hybrid clouds without compromising the overall security posture and at the same time leveraging cost and scaling benefits of the cloud. However, from our point of view, we believe that non-technical challenges and non-functional requi-rements are the most difficult ones to meet going forward.

Overall cost savings – accomplish more with less resources

Maintain and operate device configurations – governance and regulatory requirements.

Managing the change management process – re-quire significant time from engineers to describe and motivate reason for change.

Employee resources and competence availability – broader and general competence required to operate and troubleshoot increasingly complex virtualized environments.

Unclear expectations of the data center network – lack of clear specification of what to deliver.

If we take a holistic view of the non-technical chal-lenges, it boils down to how the mid-to-large sized IT departments are organized. The typical organi-zation is divided into for example a network team, a server team, a security team and an application team working perfectly within their respective silo but rarely frictionless between the silos.

There is a paradigm shift on how a modern data center network should be designed. Software Defined Networks (SDN) will be the new stan-dard and this puts completely new demands on how the IT-departments needs to be organized to work effectively in the daily tasks.

In order to be aligned with how to manage and operate data center networks, we believe that the silo way-of-working must be dismantled and a ho-rizontal organization with skills and competence from each team must be formed.

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For the majority of companies, producing IT ser-vices are not the primary purpose of the business. A construction company might develop and build properties, a bank provides private loans for your house and the purpose of the IT infrastructure should be to support the core business of the company. This means that any IT design or archi-tecture should to align with where the company needs to be today and tomorrow.

Enterprise IT and networking departments have a tendency to determine how many interfaces, what link speeds and the preferred vendor to use – even before knowing what the business require-ments are.

The problem with this approach is that it creates a disconnect between where the business wants to go and how, where and what the IT depart-ment can deliver. It is challenging to know how a design or architecture meets the requirements of the business when the focus is at determining the number of Ethernet interfaces a switch should have.

We at SecureLink believe that the right solution is determined by understanding the business objec-tives and goals and use that information to figure out what is important to your specific business.

ARCHITECT AND PLAN YOUR DESIGNS TOP-DOWN

IT Strategy Plan

Achitecture Direction

High Level Design

Low Level Design

Constructs IT Strategy plan from company’s Business and Strategy plan.

Describes how IT Services and Functions should be delivered, aligned

with IT Strategy plan.

Meets requirements and constraints from Network Architecture documents.

Meets requirements and constraints from High-Level documents.

Describes how IT should be used to reach the business goals.

Purpose, strategy and structure for how the services should be delivered to add value to the business.

A design on a high level and building the bu-siness case with background, purpose as well as investments and operational cost.

An actual implementation of a high-level design, describing how functions, services and features should be configured and used.

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THE PHYSICAL NETWORK MATTERSome SDN vendors claim that it is of no importance how the underlying physical networks are desig-ned. We believe this is a dangerous and somewhat simplified approach. Yes, by definition the software is controlling the traffic is independent of the physical design of the network, but that does not mean that traffic flows the most effective way. The workloads are still using the physical network even though it’s being abstracted through a virtual overlay.

As workloads move around the data center to maximize available compute resources, any physical network constraints such as available bandwidth and unpredictable latency, will impact application per-formance. Server infrastructure have long since been virtualized simply because it is more operationally, administratively and cost efficient. It is clear that server virtualization is here to stay and the data center network needs to be architected in a way that makes sense for those workloads.

THE EXPECTATION AND DEMAND, TO BE ABLE TO DEPLOY BUSINESS CRITICAL

APPLICATIONS IN MINUTES RATHER THAN MONTHS, DRIVES THE NEED TO CHANGE HOW

NETWORKS ARE BUILT GOING FORWARD.

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THERE IS A PARADIGM SHIFT IN DATA CENTER NETWORK DESIGN.

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There is a paradigm shift in data center network design. Many vendors and value added resellers are trying to drive the market according to the same principle as always, get the end customers to buy their products and technology and try to lock them in with the selec-ted vendor at least for the next five years.

We strongly believe that the modern data center network design requires all parties – the vendors, the value added resellers and the end customers to take a different approach to be able to run a stable, resilient and flexible future-proof data center network.

Put effort into researching what the expectations and demands of your network are, making sure that this aligns with the overall IT-strategy. Then you can start about figuring out which technology is best suited to fulfill these demands and how the network would grow for the coming years.

When this is done correctly, you are more likely to build a new network that is flexible and capable of delivering non-stop services to your organization and really make a difference in operational costs, optimiza-tion and automation.

When your underlying physical network is optimized for the future, you will also be able to leverage all the benefits in the overlay functions that SDN provides for network automation and optimization of network functions.

There is little or no operational improvement to add overlay functions on top of a physical network not designed for east-west traffic-flows (server-to-server).

Let us at SecureLink, come and talk to you about how to build your next data center network.

CONCLUSION & BENEFITS

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