Breathe New Life Into Your

Data Center Network

Demands on data center networks are greater than ever.
Is it time to upgrade your network architecture? And where do you start?

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WHY YOU SHOULD

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CENTER NETWORK

TWO WAYS TO UPDATE

YOUR DATA CENTER
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WHAT TO LOOK FOR

IN YOUR NEXT DATA
CENTER SWITCH

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Keeping Up With Those Ever-Changing Data Centers

The data center is being reinvented

again. New architectures, more powerful components and nimbler strategies are converging
in ways that promise exciting opportunities
in the way DC administrators manage their
facilities.
Driving the shift: the need to manage, store
and direct huge amounts of application traffic and other data flowing through todays data
centers. Enterprises also want to exploit the
benefits of big data to improve their IT operations, which requires an even sharper focus
on having the resources needed to store and
retrieve the information they need.
Reaching these goals means that DC managers have to carefully assess the tools at their
disposal before putting them to use. Hyperconvergencethe blending of compute, storage
and network resources in a single platform
is just one approach DC managers are taking,

BREATHE NEW LIFE INTO YOUR DATA CENTER NETWORK

but there are others to consider.

DC administrators are also re-evaluating
how they want their networks to be architected. Port speed and latencytwin considerations that confront every data centercan
be addressed in a variety of ways. The continuing maturity of software-defined networking,
meantime, provides options that werent viable
even a few years ago.
The intersection of these forces is transforming data centersnot only today, but in
the years to come. This technical guide takes a
comprehensive look at the ever-changing data
center landscape. Challenges exist, but so do an
assortment of technologies engineered to help
DC administrators meet those demands. n
Chuck Moozakis
Executive Editor
Networking Media Group

WHY
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Why You Should Upgrade Your

Data Center Network Now
The total number of network-connected
devices under management is increasing significantly, which creates more data to store and
process. So what does this mean for your data
center network architecture?

DATA CENTER NETWORK

TWO WAYS TO UPDATE
YOUR DATA CENTER
NETWORK NOW
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IN YOUR NEXT
DATA CENTER SWITCH

SURVEY SAYS

A recent TechTarget Networking Survey asked

IT pros why they were upgrading their data
center network. Overall, 44% of respondents
said the upgrade is in response to increased
applications and data. It is likely that a large
portion of those who upgrade their data centernetwork architectureto accommodate more
data do so with storage in mind.
People attach an increasing amount of
storage via the data networkEthernetas
opposed to traditional fiber channel storage
area networks, said John Burke, CIO and principal research analyst at Nemertes Research

BREATHE NEW LIFE INTO YOUR DATA CENTER NETWORK

in Mokena, Ill. Data center managers look for

switches that handle low latency and zero-loss
Ethernet loads.
Enterprises have the option to store big data
in the cloud. Significant percentages of the
TechTarget Networking Survey respondents
said the data center network needs an upgrade
to support private (26%) or hybrid (21%)
cloud.Cloud storage offers improved scalability and agility that traditional in-house storage
deployments cant match. In the future, more
enterprises might need a big data network to
stream information to cloud-hosted storage.

FEW VIEW SDN UPGRADE SOON

Only 15% of respondents in our survey intend

to upgrade to implementnetwork programmabilityorsoftware-defined networking (SDN).
Of those IT pros, 44% said they will consider
purchasing from an SDN vendor and 41% will

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evaluate a traditional network hardware vendor

that offers an SDN product. Despite major vendorsmaking a push for SDN, a slightly higher
percentage of respondents46%dont plan
to consider an SDN vendor at all and will look
to vendors with technology from a third party.
Respondents could choose more than one
option, implying most are willing to entertain
traditional as well as SDN-specific vendors for
this data center network architecture change.
Their choice will likely come down to not
only price and vendors technological offerings,
but also existing relationships.
People are willing to look at their traditional

WHAT TO LOOK FOR

IN YOUR NEXT
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network vendors now doing SDN because a

relationship has already been established and a
trust level found, Burke said. Purchasing SDN
from a familiar vendor eliminates the fear of a
new company being acquired or disappearing.
Burke added that those looking to new SDN
vendors are not concerned with protecting
existing relationships or trying to make SDN
fit into a current vendors marketing or sales
strategies.
[New vendors] offer a way to make a dramatic change and to shift rapidly to a network
driven with and by orchestration tools and
automation, he said. Sharon Zaharoff

NEW LIFE

Two Ways To Update Your Data Center Now

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Two recent developments promise to

alter the ways that compute environments
are built and managed. The first, white box
switches, lowers network component costs
while increasing the options available to network managers. The second, hyperconvergence,
simplifies management by delivering a complete compute environment as a single unit.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR

IN YOUR NEXT
DATA CENTER SWITCH

WHITE BOX SWITCHES

A white box switch consists of a commodity

or bare-metal switch with a network operating
system installed. Bare-metal switches have an
open, standardized interface. A variety of network operating systems have been designed for
that interface.
White box switches offer these benefits:
Prices are reduced and flexibility is increased
in the same way that the open, Intel-based
architecture for servers reduced server cost

BREATHE NEW LIFE INTO YOUR DATA CENTER NETWORK

compared to earlier proprietary products.

System managers can choose a server with
the processor speed and amount of memory
needed for the application and then choose to
install Windows or any of the Linux distributions to operate it.
Similarly, network managers can choose a
switch with the capacity required from among
any of the bare-metal switch vendors and then
select from among the network operating systems designed to the open switch interface.
Options for white box switches range from
freely downloadable network operating systems
to operating systems supported and maintained
by such vendors as Big Switch Networks,
Cumulus Networks or Pica8.
Another alternative is software from Open
Network Linux (ONL), an initiative from the
Open Compute Project. ONL does not include
all of the components required for a complete
operating system. But what it does provide is a

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foundation that developers can use to create a

system that will allow them to meet their own
requirements.
Bare-metal switches vendors such as Accton
Technology, Alpha Networks and Quanta Computer incorporate switch chips from Broadcom,
Intel, Marvell or Mellanox. Each chip vendor
offers a series of chips with differing capacity in terms of number of ports and per-port
bandwidth.
Switch vendors incorporate these chips
along with a processor, memory and network
interface components to create a complete
system. Most offer a series of products meeting requirements from the network edge to the
core.
Network managers can purchase hardware
directly from a bare-metal switch vendor and
add software. They can also purchase a fully
featured and supported system that includes
hardware and software. The variety of hardware
and software makes it possible for companies
to reduce their costs and benefit from more
flexibility in how they construct their networksespecially compared to earlier proprietary options.

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HYPERCONVERGENCE

Purchasing compute, network and storage components, and integrating and managing them,
has grown too complex for many IT operations. Hyperconverged systems provide everything neededcompute, storage and network
resourcesas a single unit. All components
are configured and integrated, so installation
is quick. The system is managed from a single
console by a single operator. Virtual machines
can be brought up quickly since theres no need
to issue a series of compatible commands to
individual components.
When requirements grow, you can add
resources by purchasing additional units. When
installed, they will combine with existing units
to create a single environment still managed
from the same console.
Today, IT groups must react quickly to
changing requirements. Hyperconverged systems enable IT resources to be put in place,
become productive quickly and keep pace with
rapidly shifting business demands. Combined,
white box switches and hyperconvergence offer
excellent ways to breathe new life into your
data center network. David B. Jacobs

NEXT SWITCH

What to Look for in Your Next Data Center Switch

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The desire to consolidate data center networks onto a single platform is as old as data
center networks themselves. Over the past 30
years, that consolidation has been fueled by
the deployment ofEthernetand IP. These two
deployments, after displacing other technologies for general networking, eventually moved
into other data center (DC) network operations, including management, storage connectivity and high-performance computing
interconnects.
Beyond the capital and operational efficiencies that come with having only one kind of
network to run and using the most commoditized technology to power it, getting to a single
fabricpromotes agilityand agilityis the IT
teams current watchword. More than anything
else, IT needs to knowhow to buy data center
switchesto become more agile, giving businesses the capacity to follow new opportunities
and respond to new challenges. Complex and

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special-purpose networking tend to straitjacket

an infrastructure and make it less agile.

KEY CONSIDERATIONS

Data center switching performanceis measured in two key ways: port speed and latency.
The migration to Ethernet storage and the
implementation of data center virtualization mean each network connection must do
morehandle more flows and handle more
data volume on those flows. As a result, data
centerswitchesmust support very high port
speedsand in large data centers with lots
ofvirtual machine hosts, form factors densely
packed with high-speed ports.
Latency is a growing consideration as IT
negotiates a shift from traffic flows that are
predominantly north/south (server to user)
to ones that are primarily east/west (server to
server). East/west traffic flows place a premium

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on low-latency switchingtransactions that,

behind the scenes, bounce around multiple
servers (whether they be six, 16 or 60) before
producing results. This requires network topologies that create minimal latencies to avoid
application performance issues.
The drive to lower latency leads tonetwork
flattening. A few years ago the typical system
was three-tiered: Edge switches fed into aggregation switches, which in turn fed into core
switches. Now the data center needs to move
to two-layer or even single-layer networks.
For example, a mesh is a one-layer network,
with every switch connected to every other;
the group is managed as a singlevirtual switch.
In a mesh, every server or storage node is at
most one hop from every other nodethey
are either on the same edge switch or are on
switches connected directly to each other.
Meshes depend on high port counts, since
many switch ports are dedicated to interconnecting the switches.
Aleaf-spine architecturecreates two layers:
leaf switches, to which servers and storage connect, and spine switches, to which leaf switches
connect. Every leaf node connects to each spine

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node. This means every node is at most two

hops from every other: Either they share a leaf
or each can send traffic through its leaf to a
spine node and on to the others leaf. Hybrids
and variations abound: For example, a mesh can
hang as a leaf off of a leaf-spine arrangement;
or spine nodes might have some actual compute or storage hanging off them directly as
well as interconnecting leaves (called aspline
architecture).
While everyone is dialing up the speed on
their switches, not everyone has embraced the
100 Gb standard or provided it across a number
of form factors. Similarly, low latency to some
vendors means 5microseconds (msec) of delay;
to others it is less than 1 msec. Depending on
the data center and its associated solutions
architectures, such distinctions can be the difference between success and failure for a new
service.

MANAGEMENT AND COMPLEXITY

The number of tools and platforms (component

operating systems) required to deploy a data
center is a significant point of differentiation

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among vendors. The greater the number, the

more complex and difficult ongoing operations
will be. The ideal is a unified platform with
a single management tool able to create and
manage with minimal effort whichever architecture (three-tier, leaf-spine, spline, mesh) is
most appropriate to the data centers needs.
Vendors differ also on whether they support
the ability to perform maintenance without
shutting down a switch. In the always-on data
center, any feature that allows maintenance
without downtime is a valuable benefit.

YOUR DATA CENTER

NETWORK NOW
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MIXING PHYSICAL AND VIRTUAL,

HARD AND SOFT

A key feature of the next DC network is the

integration ofvirtual and physical networks
and, by extension, network hardware resources
into software-defined networks(SDN) and
private-cloud management stacks. Switches
can, for example, support integration of virtual
networks toVLANs by unifying resource partitioning across virtual and physical domains. By
bridging virtual to physical networks, switches
can play a critical role in improving virtual

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network performance and overall network

security. The virtualization of the network is
helping IT run more like a cloud, internally;
therefore, switching support for integration
into cloud management frameworks likeOpenStackis another important goal for new data
center switching.
SDN is emerging as the next great transition in the network, the culmination of the
drive to separate network architecture from
cabling. SDN allows every network connection to provide any network service, because
services will exist separately from the switches
that provide data-plane access to the network.
To properly prepare for the migration to SDN,
enterprises now evaluating which switches to
buy should ensure their devices support the
OpenFlowstandard for switch-to-controller
communications.

THE BOTTOM LINE

In a very real sense, data center network architects and engineers are buying the future
when they buy their next DC switchesat
least theirdata centers future. The decisions

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they make, defining requirements and assessing options, will define the options available to them without requiring a substantial
investment later. So they should make these
choices with attention, not just to the crises
of the present moment and the easily anticipated projects of the next year, but also with
an eye to the two- to five-year future, which

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is of course much hazier. The wise ones will

hedge their bets by investing in equipment
that allows higher densities at higher speeds
and with lower latencies, but which also allow
easier management through platform simplification. Theyll also be sure to keep in mind
the unification of physical, virtual, traditional
and SDN. John Burke

ABOUT
THE
AUTHORS

JOHN BURKE is CIO and principal research analyst with

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Nemertes Research. With nearly two decades of technology experience, he has worked at all levels of IT, including
end-user support specialist, programmer, system administrator, database specialist, network administrator, network architect and systems architect. He has worked at
The Johns Hopkins University, The College of St. Catherine and the University of St. Thomas.

Breathe New Life Into Your Data Center Network is a

SearchNetworking.com e-publication.
Kate Gerwig | Editorial Director
Kara Gattine | Executive Managing Editor

DAVID B. JACOBS of

The Jacobs Group has more than

thirty years of networking industry experience. He has
managed leading-edge software development projects
and consulted to Fortune 500 companies as well as
software startups.

SHARON ZAHAROFF is

a technical writer for Rapid7 and

a former associate site editor for TechTarget. She has editorial and blogging experience in various fields as well.

Brenda L. Horrigan | Managing Editor

Chuck Moozakis | Executive Editor
Antone Gonsalves | News Director
Linda Koury | Director of Online Design
Jacquelyn Howard | Senior Director, Editorial Production
Martha Moore | Senior Production Editor
Doug Olender | Senior Vice President/Group Publisher
dolender@techtarget.com
TechTarget
275 Grove Street, Newton, MA 02466
www.techtarget.com
2016 TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group.

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