– Manish Gupta, Director, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell
While enterprise computing and storage have been progressively evolving, networking has been lagging behind. The need for agility and faster response time are forcing organizations today to rethink their networking infrastructure. Businesses are looking towards open networking and standardization as they eliminate the need to propriety infrastructure, reduce costs and at the same time increase flexibility. This has made networking simpler and affordable for companies of all sizes.
There have been major strides in enterprise IT infrastructure in the recent past. The business world has been moving faster and today more than ever, companies need to respond quickly, seize opportunities and drive the market. Businesses are realizing that in such an environment, IT infrastructure cannot be the one holding them back. Since Networking plays an important role in determining a company’s ability to respond quickly, ensuring that networking infrastructure contributes positively to the overall IT infrastructure is critical.
Innovations in the networking space have been fast emerging and innovative technologies such as SDN, network resource pooling, overlays, east-west traffic and cloud computing have changed how networks have to perform.
Many organisations are adapting to such innovations and deriving several business benefits from it. For instance IIHT Cloud Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a group company of IIHT Limited and one of the leading IT education providers in India, was looking to expand its business across geographies and at the same time provide anytime, anywhere hands-on learning. The company took a software defined networking (SDN) approach to its cloud services and built it on Dell Networking core switches, Dell PowerEdge servers and Dell PowerVault storage. This approach has helped the company deliver a cost-effective training environment, along with attractive pricing models for enterprises.
Some of the trends that have emerged as a result of these innovations and will transform the networking industry are:
1. The rise and establishment of Open NetworkingOpen Networking, which involves the development of an open, flexible and adaptable solution is fast gaining popularity and acceptance. Open networking enables customers to choose between supported operating system choices. The platform also has some of the latest innovations and this will lead to the full-scale disruption of networking supply chains and software.
2. Convergence becomes more practicalConvergence is becoming a reality amongst organizations with vendors developing more easily deployable and cost-effective solutions. High density converged solutions have started seeing widespread adoption amongst SMBs bringing a new era of physical density to complement the revolutionary densities already provided by virtualization.
3. Software Defined Networking provides improved user experience: SDN enables a low-cost, all-inclusive private cloud solutions to the enterprise datacenter. While other elements of the datacenter such as Servers, applications and storage have already evolved considerably, industry experts sense that SDN is a key piece in the data center evolution process, which as it seems at the moment, is moving towards the complete integration of networking, servers and storage. IDC predicts that by 2016 there will be global market of $2 billion for SDN-ready products.
4. Increased performance expectations: Companies are increasingly relying on Wi-Fi to power today’s mobile workforces. In support of this shift, Ethernet cables appear in speeds other than the standard multiples of 10. Multi-rate Ethernet will see the emergence of new performance multiples such as 25G in Data Centers. It will be further enabled by the development of a more customizable, economical way to scale datacenters.
5. Smaller organizations will opt for invisible networking: SMB organizations will look at ways to simplify their IT infrastructure and turn to “easy-button” IT options, including Wi-Fi-driven networking (to reduce cabling) and outsourced cloud storage via Microsoft Azure or other all-in-one solutions (to reduce infrastructure and in-house responsibility).
Businesses are looking at more agile networking infrastructure in order to stand out in the competitive market scenario that exists today. Open source technologies enable end users to a path of reduced costs and a greater ability to innovate. These networking trends will open the doors for greater possibilities through technology.
(The article was first published in CXOtoday.com)