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INSIDE TRACK-NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

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1 June 2012

Network infrastructure innovators need to work at a faster pace than ever before as client demands continue to increase at a rampant pace, according to several technology experts. Paul Larson, head of EMEA public and large enterprise marketing with Dell, said that advances in networking technology have been driven by organisations demanding higher efficiencies through automation and lowering operational expenditures, with the data centre being a particular focus in this respect.

Larson told ComputerScope that, "We see this specifically with the need to drive down total cost of ownership in storage at the same time that data is exploding." He added that in terms of storage Ethernet networks, there have been several impressive developments including the recent proliferation of data centre bridging (DCB) technology.

According to Larson, this allows for "more secure and reliable transport of data packets in the Ethernet protocol". He also felt the emergence of 40G network capacity is very important, adding that this will allow administrators "to collate ever-expanding links into a larger pipe, delivering power consumption and capital expenditure savings".

Larson also felt that virtualisation of the server connection through open standards such as nPar have helped CIOs to move from proprietary technologies and allowed for "more flexibility in the data centre".

From a technology standpoint, he said, these elements allow a single server connection to appear as multiple connections to the LAN, "thereby allowing more virtual machines on a given physical server".

SOFTWARE-DEFINED
Asked about the sate of the network infrastructure market Ray O’Connor, HP Networking country manager for Ireland, said that the advent of cloud computing and virtualisation is changing the demands in this space for the better. "Network mobility, security, disaster recovery, as well as the obvious bandwidth demands need to evolve as an enabler to cloud computing," he said.

Meanwhile, Network Recovery MD, Paul Lynch felt that the emergence of software defined networking (SDN) is where network architecture is really transforming. "Traditionally," he said, "the firmware of network switches and routers has been proprietary and locked to the equipment vendors. SDN brings direct software programmability to networks, and separates the control plane from the data plane."

Lynch noted how the protocol being adopted to achieve this is OpenFlow and added that "all the large network vendors" have recently announced their intention to support this standard. "The Open Networking Forum (ONF) is the organisation at the forefront of SDN and the OpenFlow protocol includes member such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft, so with these giants on board you know that OpenFlow is here to stay," said Lynch

VOIP
With regards to other technical leaps forward for network infrastructure, Francis O’Haire, technical director with DataSolutions felt that Citrix for one has "identified the need to address the networking challenges faced by cloud adopters". He added the company has responded to this need in its release of both the CloudBridge and CloudGateway products.

The former allows organisations to adopt external cloud as a secure extension of the enterprise network. O’Haire explained further, "Where CloudBridge sits at the ‘back door’ of the private data centre, CloudGateway forms the ‘front door’, providing end-users with a unified single point of access and self-service to all of their business data and apps, be they Windows, web or SaaS, on any device, anywhere."

For security consultant with Integrity Solutions, Donnachadha Reynolds the past year’s most striking network infrastructure development has been how the adoption of fully-integrated VoIP solutions, combined with backend office functions, "has really come of age". Saying that "the ease of adoption and the variety of ways of access to a corporate communication system is really impressive", Reynolds also felt that the use of real time ‘sandboxing’ by malicious content scanners is also quite a feat.

Giving a little more detail, he added, "The latest cutting edge malicious content scanners (eg for e-mail scanning) now employ technologies that extract suspected malware and run it in an isolated area called a sandbox. It examines the potential malware’s behaviour to determine whether it’s safe or not. This is light-years ahead of current signature or pattern-based malware recognition and is extremely effective."

CLOUD BENEFITS
As alluded to already, the stampede for businesses to place their data and functions in the cloud has greatly influenced recent network infrastructure developments. Not that all this influence has been positive. Donal Byrne from Triangle for instance said that in the short-term, the cloud may have complicated matters somewhat "as the integration points are worked out and the question of ‘who owns what’ from a control and administration perspective in the cloud is established".

Triangle’s senior technical architect continued, "But ultimately some of the benefits of the cloud are agility and flexibility in how infrastructure is procured, provisioned and managed. I believe this extends to the network as the cloud integrations are worked out."

In particular Byrne pointed towards developments in network integrations with cloud infrastructure components, "such as hypervisor integrations like Cisco Nexus 1000v and IBM’s new v5000" as being positives. He also mentioned that those with an interest in this area should pay attention to the exciting developments from open source networking community Vyatta and the open source multilayer virtual switch OpenvSwitch project.

Integrity’s Reynolds made the point that from a network infrastructure perspective, integration into cloud services has "really focussed attention on the availability of resilient bandwidth". The users and the cloud need connectivity, said the security consultant, and depending on the nature of the business, link interruptions can be expensive.

Expanding on his point, Reynolds said, "A lot of companies are starting to outsource or pick a branch/head office and place their own cloud there. This has influenced networks particularly in regard to WAN links and insuring each office has a secure and fast connection back to the cloud.

"WAN link speeds for a typical company have doubled and trebled in capacity in response to the amount of services which have moved out into the cloud. Correspondingly, resilience is moving onto the agenda and we are starting to see more and more adoption of clustering of firewalls and network equipment."

For O’Haire, the adoption of cloud services has definitely complicated matters in the network infrastructure space. He pointed to recent predictions from Gartner as evidence. These predictions warned that while a significant amount of organisations will adopt a hybrid cloud model as they strive to benefit from the economies of scale that public cloud provides, at the same time they must remember to keep critical or sensitive functions on-premise.

O’Haire noted, "Connecting these private and public resources, while maintaining full transparency, security and performance, is a major challenge."

FUTURE
Focusing on where we go from here, O’Haire made a prediction of his own. As more companies adopt cloud technologies, either within their own data centres or from external providers, he said it will become commonplace to see the network infrastructure of today evolve and become a "holistic service delivery fabric".

This "fabric" will be capable of supporting all applications and services, regardless of where they originate from or where they’re consumed. "This service delivery network needs to transparently aggregate and deliver services across enterprise data centres and external clouds while allowing IT to maintain security, visibility and control," O’Haire added.

For Triangle’s Byrne, the next year will involve more virtualisation of network devices and functions, with the aforementioned emergence of SDN becoming more and more relevant with the growth of OpenFlow as a standard.

Byrne is not alone in referring to this. HP’s O’Connor also pointed to the emergence of SDN as well as HP’s own Virtual Application Network (VAN) when asked about the future of network infrastructure. "Put in simple terms," he said, "VAN and SDN are about removing the reliance on very complex command-line interface-driven network configuration and moving that function to the software plane. This greatly reduces network complexity and greatly increases network flexibility."

SECURITY
When looking at the next year to 18 months Network Recovery’s Lynch honed in on the rather large issue of IPv6 and the fact that the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (the independent European internet infrastructure body) recently predicted the exhaustion of the European IPv4 stocks by the end of 2012. "We should expect to see and read a lot more about IPv6 over the next 18 months along with ISPs adopting wide support for it or starting trials," added Lynch.

Elsewhere, Sophos sales manager Dermot Hayden said that with many company networks now "bulked up" in terms of complexity, utilisation of the right security products has never been so important. "It’s an area that we and others out there will be making major inroads into over the coming year," he said. The company’s upcoming release of the wide-ranging UTM 9 product line is one such solution for securing seemingly disparate parts of the network under one appliance.

Integrity security consultant Donnachadha Reynolds was another who said that development of security around the network will be a key question in the coming months and years. With an age "online warfare" upon us companies cannot afford to be ignorant and should make sure that their house is in order should an Anonymous-style attack occur, he warned.

On a more localised front, Reynolds also said to expect to see more co-operative bandwidth projects sponsored by business, or business development boards, spring up around the country. "Communications are key for business and the phone companies are delivering a lot of lip service," said Reynolds. "Eircom is broke. Most competitor companies are re-using eircom infrastructure to deliver their service. Are the new owners of eircom going to hold the country’s broadband hostage?

"Where independent infrastructure is required, especially outside of the larger metropolitan areas, the competitor companies are slow to fill that gap. The mobile companies are equally talking the talk and not really delivering the walk.

Continuing in this vein, Reynolds added, "We were once the envy of Europe with our digital voice telephone network. Sadly in comparative terms, the Irish broadband scene is its poor distant unemployed cousin. Strategic thinking, planning and investment on a national scale is required to get us out of this situation. In the vacuum of proper direction and guidance, local innovation from small Irish businesses will try to fill that gap."

DISTRIBUTED CORE
On a less politicised note, Dell’s Larson also addressed the question of where network infrastructure developments will come from over the next few years. He said that of late he’s seen many CIOs clamouring for "a more efficient and automated network infrastructure". In turn, he felt vendors who deliver cost effective and flexible solutions will prosper in the near future.

"The shift taking place is the move to a distributed core [architecture]. Rather than invest in costly switch backbones, data centre managers’ desire architectures that are more resilient, scalable and offer greater cost savings," said Larson.

The upcoming drivers of distributed core architectures, according to Larson, are TRILL, or ‘transparent interconnect of lots of links’ to give it its full title, deployment of 100G cores, and "advanced management products".

"TRILL adoption will revolutionise LANs," he confidently stated. "This technology effectively replaces [the] spanning tree [protocol], which was introduced in the original Ethernet specification. Also, 100G core will begin migrating from telecommunications companies and into data centres, such as into internet exchanges and automated financial traders. Then, from there it will move into mid markets."

"To fully optimise distributed core, administrators must be able to get a view to the network to monitor and manage. To become strategically agile, the business must be able to predict usage growths for future infrastructure investments. New tools will come available which will offer this scalability and flexibility, thereby easing a need to re-architect a network with each new project," concluded Larson.

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