Data Center and Network Infrastructure

the state of

research report

>>exeCutIve summary: companies recognize how critical the It infrastructure is to enterprise success. they also recognize the need to reduce risk and costs, and increase agility and per-formance as they architect their next-generation networks and data centers.

2 December 09

research report

I t’s never been more important for companies to have a stable, high-performing, and cost-efficient network and data center infrastructure upon which to run — and innovate — their core business processes. In a difficult economy, companies can’t afford to jeopardize the seamless information exchange that contributes to business

intelligence, or the fast and efficient transaction processing that drives revenue. Nor can they neglect opportunities to make the applications and architectures that support these requirements more nimble.

At the same time, as data center and networking components run more and more busi-ness functions, the infrastructure consumes a larger and larger share of the budget, and so becomes a prime cost-cutting target.

Confronted with the challenges of eliminating risk, increasing agility and reining in costs, many CIOs are facing their first major network and data center infrastructure upgrades since Y2K. Fewer devices, flatter architectures and higher-speed network interfaces all factor into plans to re-architect and rebuild data centers and data and storage networks. This approach is required to support unprecedented levels of data growth and rising performance requirements without increas-ing operational costs.

Business and IT executives alike recognize how important the computing infrastructure is to the success of the enterprise. In a new survey on the state of data center and networking infrastructure, conducted by TechWeb for Brocade, nearly 60 percent of 220 IT and business executives in large companies said they are convinced that the quality and performance

of the network determines an organization’s ability to successfully compete and grow in today’s marketplace. The recognition of the network’s importance by those in the C-suite is important to CIOs’ efforts to craft high-performance, next-generation infrastructures in a challenging economic environment.

“The business leaders [understand] how the network is important,” says Jim Edmiston, director of information technology for Youth for Understanding USA. The nonprofit is based in Bethesda, Md., and has remote offices in four other locations. “Do they understand what the optimal packet

size is? No. Do they care? No. They care [that] IT can be leveraged to do the things the organization needs the most.”

That understanding doesn’t, however, translate into giving IT lead-ers unlimited budgets. Like other parts of the business, most IT departments have been operating with constrained budgets. In the TechWeb survey, nearly a third of the respondents said their 2009 overall IT spending had decreased, and another quarter noted that spending was flat. Next year promises more freedom: Nearly 60 percent expect an uptick in overall IT spending in 2010, compared to just 42 percent of respondents who saw any increase at all this year. In most cases, however, expectations are for overall spending to increase only slightly rather than significantly.

Yet, amidst the belt tightening, it’s clear that most companies recognize the importance of making key investments in networking

and data center infrastructure as part of their spending plans. They realize this is required to cost-effectively future-proof these environments to meet the demand for networking and

storage capacity that is being driven by the exponential growth of data and traffic. Nearly half the respondents in the survey increased spending in this area last year, and a slight majority of respondents foresee investment increases in 2010 specifi-cally for networking and data center infrastructure.

For example, networking upgrades are a priority at Northeast-ern Illinois University, which serves 12,000 students. In the past 12 months the Chicago institution has made several improvements to obtain more bandwidth to roll out new ser-vices, as well as increase the resiliency of its network, says Kim Tracy, executive director, University Technology Services. The university had been experiencing some problems with the stability of its existing core, and the upgrades included adding a second, dual-core switch to the network as well as dually connecting all edge switches to those cores. Additionally, the university added a second ISP and network load balancer to increase bandwidth and enable a reliable failover plan in the event of one ISP’s failure.

A top business issue affecting data centers and networking is the increasing number of applica-tions and data that must be highly or always available, according to the 45 percent of survey respondents who say this represents a substantial impact on these infrastructures. Similar to many other large organizations, Northeastern University finds it critical to protect itself against unexpected outages or other disruptions to core business processes. “Unplanned downtime can have a serious impact,” Tracy notes. Students pay their bills online and access the learning management system online, and when the ERP system becomes inaccessible, administrators and others suffer as well. “It really [has an impact on] the administration, professors and students. We are managing the risks by trying to build a resilient infrastructure, planning a DR [disaster recovery] site for critical services, and implementing a monitoring and alarming system.”

3 December 09

research report

4 December 09

research report

Infrastructure ImpactAlthough universities may be less ROI-driven than businesses, their IT depart-ments still must have stability in their cost structures and consider future operating expenses in their infrastructure plans. Northeastern is always looking for ways to reduce its cost structure without losing any services, Tracy says. In fact, according to the TechWeb survey, reducing the cost of doing business is an infrastructure priority. It was named by 43 percent of respondents as another top business issue that has a substantial impact on data center and networking infrastructure plans.

Interestingly, just 10 percent of respondents indicated that the pursuit of energy efficiency/green computing initiatives has a substantial impact on these plans. But that just may go to show that “green computing” and “energy efficiency” carry more weight as buzzwords than as business concepts — or possibly have less direct impact on the survey respondents. Whatever the case, they are often the positive by-product of strategic improvements to the infrastructure that deliver faster performance and greater scalability while also drawing less power — and so very much contribute to the core goal of reducing business costs.

It’s clear that operating costs are rising in regard to powering the infrastructure. Analysts estimate that global data center electricity usage approximately doubled between 2000 and 2005. On the networking component end, the power draw and cooling requirements for older switching infrastructure can be a very large proportion of ongoing IT expenses. Electricity prices are not coming down any time soon, and as growing application data and storage requirements drive demand for higher port density and bandwidth, the number of network devices and power consumption steadily tick up. Moving to a modern switching infrastructure can deliver much higher performance levels while drawing one-quarter of the power of the technology that was out there even four or five years ago. These days, organizations can upgrade to multiterabit high-capacity switch systems, collapsing numerous devices into one or two chassis for immedi-ate savings in power consumption and cooling. That’s also important for addressing the fact that many regions are facing physical constraints in available electricity supply, which puts some organizations at risk of running out of power in their data centers.

Business issues are just one piece of the picture affecting how data centers and networks evolve. The other piece relates to technology issues. And the technology initiative that most influences the direction of data center and net-working infrastructures is virtualization, which has been kicked into high gear by concerns about everything from high operating (including power) costs for low system utilization rates to limits on data center capacity. More than one-third of large companies in the survey pointed to virtualization as having a substantial impact on their infrastructures.

Server virtualization is the epitome of the do-more-with-less philosophy that has char-acterized IT operations over the last few years. Businesses increasingly are becoming more comfortable multiplexing 10 or more applications on a single compute node, driving utilization rates up to 80 percent or even 90 percent. As more servers are consolidated, companies may also need fewer people to manage the physical infrastructure. Over time,

5 December 09

research report

that should add up to savings in both capital and labor costs. As virtualization technology matures, it is becoming as valuable for its long-term total cost of ownership potential as for the agility and responsiveness it enables IT to deliver to the business. With virtualiza-tion, IT can deploy applications to the business more quickly, migrate them in real time as demands shift, and automatically recover workloads from system failures.

Every gain has an associated impact, however. IT leaders need to consider that, as more virtualized workloads are consolidated onto fewer compute platforms, the I/O requirements of those platforms go up. They can quickly scale from default 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) connection speeds to 10 GbE interfaces that must be supported by high-performance switching infrastructures.

Northeastern Illinois Univeristy is preparing for this possibility. The university is rolling out server virtualization in the data center, using both VMware for its Windows-based servers and Solaris 10 containers for its Sun servers. About half the servers are virtualized so far. “I do think we will have to upgrade our data center networking as a result of virtualization, and that’s why we’ve planned some 10 GbE connections in the data center as part of the core switch upgrade,” says Tracy. Another factor in the university’s plans: It’s considering deploying desktop virtualization, which could have a heavy impact on networking in the data center, as well.

Just over 60 percent of surveyed companies indicated that they are planning to increase bandwidth capacity to the data center or cloud to address challenges they’re facing in their networks today. As factors such as virtualization drive 10 GbE adoption rates, it’s important for businesses to ensure that the networking infrastructure they choose supports line-rate performance. That is, if you’re buying 16 10 GbE port switches or routers, you should get aggregate perfor-mance that’s equal to 16 times 10 GbE under all circumstances — and not be sur-prised that there’s not enough capacity to run each port at line rate at certain packet sizes or with certain features enabled.

Server virtualization also is in play to some extent at Gracenote, a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America that pro-vides digital media identification, management and discovery services for consumers. The company also licenses its technology to consumer electronic device manufacturers, online media players, and auto and cellular device manufacturers. One concern that VP of operations Matthew Leeds has is the technology’s impact on the storage network. “You want to make sure you’re not overprovisioning for storage,” says Leeds, whose company in the last 18 months moved from using direct attached storage to a 4 Gbps Fibre Channel storage area network.

It’s often the practice in virtual environments to overprovision storage as a hedge against shortcomings in capacity planning, or as a way to ensure that data stores can support individual virtual machine growth. But this reduces storage utilization and flies in the face of optimizing the use of existing resources. Nearly half the survey respondents in large companies consider storage overallocation in virtual/cloud environments to be a substantial

6 December 09

research report

or moderate network challenge. That’s why it’s important for infrastructure vendors to help organizations deal with such issues, in part by working with virtual server vendors to develop software interfaces that simplify virtual storage provisioning.

Confronting ComplexityOrganizations are concerned that management and troubleshooting will become more com-plex when applications no longer run on discrete pieces of hardware. “Multiple VMs share a single physical Ethernet connection, so if there’s network congestion, figuring out which VM contributes to it can be more complicated,” says Leeds. He thinks it would be helpful to have more efficient ways of managing the virtual infrastructure and the applications run-ning across it than by adding more dashboards to the mix, since there are better uses for highly skilled and costly IT staff than to watch dashboards.

Indeed, there’s no reason for network infrastructure components to add another layer to the toolsets IT departments already use to manage virtual machines, servers, storage, network connections or anything else. The job of network infrastructure suppliers should be to fit into the orchestration frameworks upon which IT has already standardized, feeding information into these toolsets about what is going on in the networking infrastructure and taking direction from them about how to respond to issues.

As important as this approach is to minimizing the number of discrete monitoring tools with which IT must deal, such integration is equally important to preserving openness and choice in what has been and probably will continue to be heterogeneous customer environments. That includes the use of multiple hypervisors in increasingly virtualized data centers. It’s simply not practical for most customers to take the complexity out of managing virtual machine environments by discarding their existing assets and moving to a vertically integrated subset of components that includes compute nodes, network interfaces and orchestration frameworks.

There is more work to be done on the management front in regard to integrating virtualization. More than half the surveyed respondents in large organizations cited the inad-equacy of traditional management tools for supporting dynamic data center environments. Things cer-tainly don’t get much more dynamic than when data centers are virtual-

ized, and that requires taking management capabilities to the next level. “If you are going to have a virtual strategy in the data center, then the things that connect and interact with the virtual servers — the network, the storage and such things — need to be managed in conjunction with it, not separate and apart from it, as it has been historically,” says Yankee Group Senior Vice President Zeus Kerravala.

Virtualization, for example, requires IT to ensure that not only server capabilities, such as processor and memory capacity, are accounted for when considering where to move virtual workloads, but also to take into consideration other assets, such as the storage area network, to ensure the application’s continuity. To enable that without adding yet another management tool to the stack, it’s important that network infrastructure vendors provide interfaces to virtual management frameworks from VMware, Microsoft, IBM, EMC and other vendors, to report data to them on the health of the SAN in order to enable better decision-making when redeploying virtual applications.

is the epitome of the do-more-with-less philosophy that has characterized It operations over the last few years.

server vIrtualIzatIoN

7 December 09

research report

Automation clearly is the direction for streamlining the management of data center and networking components in virtual environments. The responsibility of transport providers is not only to provide information and take directions from the management frameworks IT departments already use, but also to automate as much as possible in the network infra-structure itself. When virtual workloads migrate within environments where the edge of the network is virtual machine-aware and policy-aware, the infrastructure is then smart enough to automatically migrate performance and security policies and connections along with the virtual machines. All of this should be transparent to outside entities.

The automatic migra-tion of security policies in virtual environments, including populating secu-rity profiles on switches, is one important way of addressing what survey respondents cite as a pri-mary network challenge today (and a perennial one as well): threats from security breaches. Twenty-three percent said that this is their most substan-tial network challenge, and 48 percent consider it a moderate challenge. Security also comes up as a challenge in another way: Twenty-one percent of respondents said that maintaining up-to-date

transparency into network security elements has become a substantial challenge, while more than half said it remains a moderate challenge.

To address such concerns, nearly 60 percent of survey respondents said they are buying more security and threat-management products. But IT leaders should be judicious about where they’re putting their dollars: Security solutions that rely on deploying agents on serv-ers or integrating them into applications consume network bandwidth, as well as CPU and hard drive capacity, which can affect the efficient delivery of services and data to users. Organizations should instead strive for a holistic data center security strategy where the intelligence resides directly on the network infrastructure without burdening servers. For example, they might want to leverage the built-in intelligence of a high-performance and flexible storage fabric (an inherently secure environment because it hosts the majority of corporate data) to create a centralized and consistent security strategy that protects data in the data center fabric, on the edge of the network, during the backup cycle, in archives, and even during transport between devices and to business systems.

Convergence aheadAmong survey respondents’ other plans for addressing their network challenges are purchas-ing or upgrading application performance monitoring or analysis software (52 percent) and buying application acceleration/load balancing tools (38 percent). Also important to about

8 December 09

research report

one-third of the respondents is upgrading their networks to support unified communications and video. Migrating voice, video and videoconferencing traffic onto the IP data network can lead to better utilization of the network, reduced operating costs, and easier support for issues that affect end users, such as telephony moves, additions and changes. For these reasons, many CIOs already have or plan to move their organizations in this direction.

Youth for Understanding in the last year has deployed Voice-over-IP over a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) architecture using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunking out of its co-location facility. That’s a route to “gigantic savings” on long-distance communications for an organization that has 50 partners worldwide participating in its student exchange program, says Edmiston. The organization has fully converted three offices so far and is on the way to doing the same for the rest. But “things change drastically once you try to overlay voice and data on the same pipe and implement QoS [quality of service] rules,” he says. “You need constant monitoring to make sure you’re tweaking things to maximize the trade-off between voice and data traffic if you are in any way limited to the total bandwidth used by the given network segment.”

A switching infrastructure with the hardware-based intelligence to provide QoS for services such as voice over IP — without the need for manual configuration — can help reduce complexity in unified communications infrastructures. In addition to reducing the costs of placing IP phones on the appropriate VLAN, such intelligence helps avoid the potential for incorrect setup that could lead to lower-quality voice communications.

Moving such rich services onto the IP network also puts a high premium on using service provider-quality equipment in the networking infrastructure. As reliable as networking tech-nology has become, there’s still a risk to having more and more critical business services residing on a single network. As a hedge against that, it’s critical to ensure high availability through an integrated hardware and software architecture that delivers a fully redundant

design with no single points of failure, and which provides features that increase network-level reliability by minimizing the impact of a node failure.

There’s another kind of network convergence that’s also draw-ing interest: One-quarter of respondents to the TechWeb survey in large companies said they expected to meet some network challenges by migrating from an application-centric infrastruc-ture and storage silos to a shared infrastructure that uses a common fabric. Just over 50 percent said that they have plans to support virtualized data center efforts by moving to a uni-fied network for storage and server connectivity. Fewer than one-fifth of large companies plan to undertake such an effort in the next couple of years, while nearly one-quarter have not yet set a timeline for this.

Still, a unified data center is on the horizon. One-third said they expected one substantial advantage of moving in this direction to be simplified network management, while just under 30 percent in each case considered substantial advantages such as capital expense cost reductions, dynamic allocation of pooled storage resources for virtualization and virtual application mobility, and improved service level guarantees. Nearly one-quarter, in fact, said that the need to improve service levels is a business issue that has a substantial impact on developments in their data center and networking infrastructure. Approximately half the respondents have seen no change in their SLA performance over the past year, while

9 December 09

research report

one-quar ter of respondents said they’ve seen improvements.

Clearly, there is much to be gained from converging more and more ser-vices, from rich media such as voice and video conferencing to storage, onto the IP network. But practicality must hold sway over utopian visions of having a single kind of network-ing technology and single protocol to manage all services — at least in the near future. Yet, it is possible today to get the advantages of a single cable

plan/single transport infrastructure: Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is the upcoming convergence technology for the data center. Rather than reconciling the Fibre Channel protocol that controls most of the blocked storage environment with the IP protocol that controls the data center network, FCoE enables the native Fibre Channel protocol and native IP protocol to run atop Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) wiring.

It makes sense that more businesses are looking farther out on the horizon in terms of moving such converged networking deployments forward. “The technology has to be more future-proofed before there’s mass market adoption,” says Kerravala. So vendors need to accommodate those whose plans are hazier — they must provide a clear path to convergence with solutions that cost-effectively support the discrete IP and Fibre Channel infrastructures they have now and are readily upgradable to the next stage. Then, IT leaders won’t be forced to converge their networks on anyone’s schedule but their own, and their infrastructure will be in good shape when the time is right to make the move.

For those who are anticipating a migration during the next one to two years, a smart approach is to begin deploying FCoE and CEE at the edge of the network. It’s in that first five feet into the network infrastructure where FCoE currently can change — and is changing — the land-

scape. Using copper rack switches in that environment, CIOs can minimize risk and gain cost savings by leveraging FCoE to perform convergence inside a rack, and split back out to legacy Fibre Channel storage and Ethernet data networks at the top of the rack.

Just over 70 percent of respondents in the survey character-ized as very or somewhat important the ability to leverage standards and existing technology investments as part of a unified data center strategy. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has approved for publication a final standard for FCoE, for example. Important to the evolution of these and other standards is ensuring that the reliability and efficiency that Fibre Channel has already demonstrated for data center applications continues as separate SAN and LAN protocols converge on a common transport system for simplified server connectivity. IT leaders, for example, can’t afford slow reac-

tions to link and switch failures that can result in read-and-write issues. The Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) bridge path management protocol being developed in an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group focuses on improving the use of all available paths and reacting faster to link and switch failures.

10 December 09

research report

a New WorldIT leaders want to see real results as they push ahead with their data center and network upgrade plans. “You just don’t go out and buy the next thing because it’s available, but because it’s a solution to a real problem you have or are about to have,” says Gracenote’s Leeds. “Hopefully the latter, as you want to be ahead of a problem.”

In a challenging economy, CIOs also want to see the results — enhanced flexibility and stability, as well as greater performance and cost controls — of their investments in a more compressed time frame. Toward that end, it’s unrealistic to think that infrastructure upgrades can be focused on a wholesale replacement of the existing heterogeneous infrastructure with large-scale vertically integrated systems that purport to deliver virtualization, networking and orchestration frameworks in a single device. IT leaders should be wary of moving in this direction not just because it means a long road to ROI, but also because it’s risky to invest in a Version 1 approach to this idea when mission-critical applications are involved.

Today’s data centers and net-works must be re-architected for the future without abandon-ing what works in the present, or locking customers into an unproven model that puts all the cards in a single vendor’s hands. When equipment must be amortized over 12 months rather than over three or four years, as is the case now, IT

leaders want to repurpose systems for new requirements as much as possible, while mak-ing strategic improvements that reduce IT costs and improve operational performance to handle the massive growth in network traffic and data. They’ll do that with higher-density, higher-performance, more energy-efficient and future-proofed LAN and SAN solutions that interoperate with their best-of-breed vendors and reduce the network layers that have built up over the past decade.

It’s a new world for IT leaders’ data center and network infrastructures. That world is going to be defined by state-of-the-art technologies that adhere to industry standards as much as it will be by open architectures that enable choice and foster adaptability in today’s dynamic environments.

how Brocade fits into your Next-Generation Data Center and Network

IT leaders contemplating their network and data center infrastructure upgrades need to consider how potential vendors rate on a variety of important features. Here’s how network-ing industry leader Brocade fares on a few critical counts:

High Performance: ■ Brocade-enhanced aggregation technology in Brocade NetIron® XMR and MLX routers supports as many as 32 10 GbE links simultaneously, acting as a single 320 Gbps pipe.

■ The Brocade DCX® Backbone in independent testing offers four times the number of ports available for dedicated, simultaneous 8 Gbps line-rate traffic, compared to the nearest competitor.

that more businesses are looking farther out on the horizon in terms of moving converged networking deployments forward.

It makes seNse

11 December 09

research report

High Adaptability/Openness: ■ Brocade technology is forward and backward compatible across product families, such as 1 and 10 GbE dual-port capabilities in Brocade TurboIron® top-of-rack switches.

■ The Brocade DCX Backbone includes a built-in upgrade path to emerging technology standards such as CEE and FCoE.

■ Brocade APIs communicate with existing third-party orchestration frameworks to present information from the network and take direction from those orchestration tools back into the network.

High Energy Efficiency:■ Brocade solutions — including the Brocade TurboIron 10 GbE top-of-rack switches, Brocade ServerIron application delivery controller and Brocade FastIron Edge switches — combine high performance with reduced power and cooling requirements, an especially beneficial solution for IT departments now spending up to 25 percent of their total budgets on energy and operations.

■ The Brocade DCX Backbone in independent testing offers almost three times the reduc-tion in power consumption compared to its nearest competitor.

These represent just a few of the many ways Brocade provides high-density, high-throughput, open-architected and operationally efficient solutions to meet IT leaders’ requirements. To find out more, visit www.brocade.com.

TechWeb MarkeTing ServiceS:

Pamala mcGlinchey: Vice President, Marketing Operationselliot kass: Vice President, Content Serviceslisa Broscritto: Director, Integrated Marketing ProgramsGene fedele: Vice President, Corporate Creative Director

© 2009 TechWeb, a Division of United Business Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

>>methoDoloGy: In august 2009, techWeb conducted an online study for brocade. the questionnaire was developed by brocade with input from techWeb, and questions focused on business and technology issues relating to data centers and the networking infrastructure at organizations. the sample for this survey was derived from e-mail invitations to techWeb’s quali-fied database of business technology decision makers. only those respondents with a job title of director level or above, in companies of 100 or more employees, were included in the final data set. a total of 220 qualified respondents (director level and above) completed the survey. the data from these interviews were tabulated and analyzed, and are the basis for this report. these procedures were carried out in strict accordance with standard market research practices. charts in this report are based on data from these 220 respondents, unless otherwise noted. of the total data set of 220 respondents, there were 73 respondents with an executive It management job title of cIo, cto or vice president of It. at a 95 percent confidence level, the greatest possible margin of error for the total sample size (220) is +/- 4.5 percentage points.

Jennifer Zaino wr i tes about the business app l i ca t i ons of IT. She is a regu la r con -t r i b u t o r t o TechWeb and former execut ive ed i tor o f InformationWeek and Network Computing.

>> aBout the author: