FEATURE: DATA CENTRE SOLUTIONS //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
A new approach to
operational efficiency
According to Gartner, ‘the top networking
challenge… is improving agility’. This, of
course, is not a big surprise. What is surprising
is Gartner’s advice to ‘pick how you want to
manage your data centre network first, then
pick the vendor/products that can slot into
that decision’. This means that the answer
to improving your organisation’s network
speed and agility is not necessarily by buying
expensive, proprietary monster switches and
premium automation solutions. Instead,
modernisation starts with IT and network
operations which can be achieved through
network automation, greater overall visibility
into the network, and IT-as-a-Service models.
A conventional ‘one size fits all’ approach to
networking just doesn’t work in the cloud era.
In order to prepare the network for
Digital Transformation, it has to be both
customised to fit your organisation’s needs
and be flexible enough to adapt when
those needs change.
Naturally, each networking vendor
presents their solution as having the
beefiest hardware and the most cutting-
edge software. They can make that claim
56
INTELLIGENTCIO
because often they will make both the
hardware and software work together
flawlessly. But hidden in the midst of this
seemingly unbeatable combination is
a problem: although the tight coupling
of hardware and software by the same
manufacturer may ensure compatibility, it
kills flexibility. If your network’s hardware
and software is inflexible and cumbersome,
it will always be a hindrance to agility.
No matter how dedicated your network
team is, they can’t change the underlying
architecture of a vendor’s solution. That’s
why it’s crucial for your organisation to
adopt a solution that enables you to scale
and automate your network.
The importance of scalability
Network scalability means growing the
data centre network in proportion to your
organisation’s needs. There are different
levels of scalability, as well as different
ways to achieve it. For example, if an
organisation has to triple network spend
to double capacity and performance, the
network isn’t very scalable. But if they
reverse the numbers – double the network
spend and triple capacity and performance
(and do so quickly) – the network is
highly scalable. The level of scalability the
organisation can achieve depends on the
underlying network architecture.
Each organisation must decide whether to
scale vertically or scale horizontally. While
this might sound like a topic that IT geeks
debate over a cup of coffee, it’s a decision
that creates a ripple effect throughout the
rest of the organisation.
Traditionally, if an organisation has been
unsure about which particular switch model
will be beefy enough to meet its growth
needs, it has opted for the larger (and more
expensive) one. To use IT jargon, they
would scale up or scale vertically to meet
performance requirements. That’s not
necessarily unreasonable. But when taking
the vertical scaling approach, organisations
are limited to the biggest box available at
the time. And if the monster switch they
bought isn’t big enough, they then have
to rip it out and replace it, which translates
into downtime.
Instead of buying a large, high-capacity
switch, you can combine multiple smaller
switches to get the performance you could
get from one large switch. This is called
scaling out or scaling horizontally. The
advantage of this is that you aren’t limited
www.intelligentcio.com