“Like professional sport, sometimes you have to go back to the basics to be able to compete at the top level,” said Tim Murphy, CEO with Strencom, and, he added, it is exactly the same when it comes to “enterprise networks and cloud over the past 12 to 18 months”.
Expanding on his view of this fast moving market, Murphy explained that most medium to large enterprises he has dealt with in that timeframe have been given a mandate to move more and more of their internal applications and services to the cloud. Aimed at creating a greater level of “flexibility to scale as the economy recovers”, it can also, he said allow them to “concentrate on their core business activity”.
However, said Murphy, “that can only be done if you have the right networking in place, both internally and externally, so that’s where going back to the basics comes in to play. Since the start of this year, we have seen a big trend in organisations bolstering their external wide area networks (WANs) so that they are capable of delivering on the promises that cloud services offer”.
The Strencom CEO added that his advice to any organisation considering cloud solutions — “and that takes in most companies at this stage” — would be to ensure the business has the right network in place to support their cloud.
East-west
Looking back over the past year, GM with Commtech, Gerry Harvey said the evolving nature of east-west traffic has had a major impact on enterprise networking and on WAN optimisation. It is a point with which Adrian Sadlier, solutions division sales manager at Kedington concurred, noting that “within the data centre, east-west traffic is now about 80% of network traffic”.
Harvey added to his original point saying that “the relentless adoption of server virtualisation continues to impact on the enterprise network”, and that this, added to the increasing use of hosted applications in datacentres, has given rise to the dramatic growth in data networking which is east west.
“Most large IT organisations are experiencing dramatic increases in the volume of this traffic,” he said. “The growth in this traffic volume stems in part from data proliferation in general and in part from an increased emphasis on improving the IT organisation’s ability to support business agility and business continuity,” said Harvey.
Breaking the concept down a little, Sadlier said that in the context of the data centre local area network (LAN), east-west traffic is “the traffic that goes between servers in a given data centre”. North-south traffic meanwhile is the client server traffic that goes between users in a branch office and the data centre that hosts the application that they are accessing, and that is “down to about 20% on average”.
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