BUILD A BUSINESS CASE NOW S THE TIME TO INVEST IN NETWORK ARCHITECTURES THAT MAXIMIZE VIRTUALIZATION AND CLOUD COMPUTING table of contents.... 1.... 2.... 3.... 5 A TechTarget White Paper
Business and IT leaders are looking to virtualization and cloud computing to deliver unprecedented agility for supporting a wide range of objectives, including cost management, increased mobility, higher application availability and greater responsiveness to customer-related opportunities. More than 90% of IT professionals expect to increase virtualization initiatives in 2013 1, while cloud computing is being heralded as part of a dominant new platform that will account for at least 80% of IT spending growth through the end of the decade. 2 Cumulatively, organizations around the world have spent billions of dollars on their virtualized infrastructures. By the end of 2013, nearly three quarters of all server workloads are expected to run in virtualized environments. 3 The first wave of virtualization has delivered dramatic benefits to organizations through consolidation, improved utilization, reduced total cost of ownership, efficient energy consumption and more effective use of physical space. But organizations have only scratched the surface of virtualization s potential. There s a bigger payoff ahead: Businesses have the opportunity to use the shared resources and enhanced flexibility offered by virtualization to build a foundation for expanded cloud computing initiatives and for breakthrough improvements in business agility. Consolidated and integrated infrastructures will enable organizations to use real-time information to transform customer experiences and support new paradigms in mobility and agility. The creation of these new models, however, is stretching the limits of existing infrastructures and, in particular, demanding new levels of performance, resiliency, flexibility and simplified scalability that extend beyond the capabilities of traditional data center networks. To deliver on the promise of virtualization and cloud computing, IT and network professionals are recognizing that they must deploy flatter network architectures that are optimized to deliver the speed, simplicity and resiliency required for today s rapidly evolving compute environments. Guiding Principles for Why are flatter network architectures required for today s compute environments? What problems do they address, and what are the key guiding principles that should inform IT decision-making about which solutions to deploy for next-generation business initiatives? 1 2013 Virtualization Management Survey, InformationWeek, Nov. 1, 2012. 2 IDC Predicts 2012 Will Be the Year of Mobile and Cloud Platform Wars as IT Vendors Vie for Leadership While the Industry Redefines Itself, IDC, Dec. 1, 2011. 3 Big Data, Tablets and Enterprise Disruption: Part 1, Charles Bonello, citing Morgan Stanley research, Oct. 22, 2012. 1
Flat networks deliver the speed, resiliency and simple scalability required to support today s highly virtualized data centers, where the preponderance of network traffic flows east-west between servers, storage and other devices. However, most traditional data center networks are hierarchical, designed with layers of switches and Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) to support an earlier era in which data traffic was predominantly north-south. This hierarchical design forces east-west traffic to first go up and down the switch layers, creating all kinds of performance issues and introducing latency that can cripple the productivity of mission-critical applications. In addition, these traditional data center networks don t scale very well, and the oversubscription of ports can be a significant challenge in highly virtualized cloud environments. Performance is further compromised as virtual machines are spun up or moved, since application performance depends on each VM s proximity to other VMs and storage resources. Management complexity is another challenge posed by traditional data center networks. Provisioning new devices across the network is still a labor-intensive and timeconsuming process that needs to be sped up and simplified to support business agility and IT responsiveness. Simplified manageability is also required to keep operating expenses in check. As IT and network professionals address these challenges, they are looking at next-generation network architectures built on these guiding principles: n Performance with flat network architectures, optimized to handle the east-west traffic prevalent in today s data centers n Management simplicity with the ability to orchestrate physical and virtual environments in a highly automated manner that simplifies operations, enables elastic scalability and reduces overall operating expenses n Resiliency in delivering consistent performance and elimination of downtime, enabling organizations to run their most strategic applications in highly virtualized cloud environments n Flexibility in deploying applications anywhere in the data center without degrading performance Architectural Approaches to Building Next- With the availability of flatter network architectures, there is no need for IT and networking professionals to continue dealing with the potentially crippling performance bottlenecks of their legacy data center networks. 2
Juniper Networks offers two unique technologies designed from the ground up to address today s data center network challenges: Virtual Chassis and QFabric. Either of these architectural approaches can be deployed to deliver immediate performance improvements without requiring the organization to rip and replace the entire data center. The Virtual Chassis and QFabric technologies eliminate switching layers, collapsing and consolidating the networks to enable data centers to evolve from today s three-tier hierarchy to a simpler, flatter architecture. This is achieved by interconnecting multiple independent devices to create a single, logical device that enhances performance, improves resiliency and simplifies manageability. By creating a two-tier or switch-based fabric, Juniper s architectural approaches reduce network complexity, decreasing the number of connections, enabling centralized management and making the entire data center easier to maintain. In addition to a simplified architecture, Juniper offers solutions that simplify operations with features such as Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) and Puppet for Junos OS. ZTP allows organizations to provision new network switches automatically, without any staging or manual intervention, so IT departments can quickly deploy new devices and scale rapidly. With Puppet for Junos OS software, organizations can manage physical and virtual environments in concert with one another. Juniper s Architectural Virtual Chassis technology lets organizations interconnect up to 10 switches and manage them as a single, logical device, enabling the consolidation of switch layers in the data center. Designed for organizations that want to support both 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 10GbE connections in the same network, Virtual Chassis technology is available on Juniper EX Series switches and has been deployed by more than 10,000 customers since its introduction in 2008. In addition to simplified management, Juniper s Virtual Chassis technology offers benefits that are lacking in competing solutions, particularly in delivering the functionality and flexibility required for virtualized and cloud environments. These include: n Performance: EX Series switches with Virtual Chassis technology are optimized for east-west traffic and offer a fabric bandwidth of up to 256 Gbps. Virtual Chassis technology uses advanced algorithms based on industry-standard protocols that optimize routes between servers, creating a high-performance network. In addition, the technology eliminates the need for STP between layers, improving infrastructure utilization. 3
n Resiliency: Virtual Chassis technology offers sub-second failover times with nonstop routing and nonstop bridging features. Non-stop service upgrades mean the network can be upgraded without downtime, enabling improvements in business service and application availability. Virtual Chassis technology also allows for simplified scalability through plug-and-play operation, whereby additional switches can be plugged into an existing Virtual Chassis configuration without any disruption to the network. n Flexibility: Juniper EX4500/EX4550 10GbE switches can be combined in the same Virtual Chassis configuration with EX4200 1GbE platforms, making EX Series switches the only next-generation solution that allows customers to mix and match their 10GbE and 1GbE server environments. When deployed in conjunction with EX9200 programmable switches, or EX8200 modular chassis deployed in a Virtual Chassis configuration, users can consolidate their core and aggregation layers, further increasing business agility. QFabric technology is a disruptive architecture that allows customers to manage up to 6,000 10GbE ports as a single switch. Fabric technology implements a flat architecture that enables any-to-any connectivity, dramatically improving performance and simplifying manageability. Like Virtual Chassis technology, Juniper s QFabric technology delivers benefits that are not available in competing solutions, including: n Performance: QFabric offers performance at scale. The organization can grow the network to more than 6,000 10GbE ports without any performance degradation. With 40 Gbps uplinks between top-of-rack switches and the fabric, QFabric delivers less than 5us latency between any two servers. n Location independence: QFabric performance does not depend on its location in the network. Since all servers are equidistant from one another, customers can move their virtual machines in the data center without having to worry about performance degradation. n Storage convenience: QFabric offers native Fibre Channel ports on its nodes, as well as support for Fibre Channel over Ethernet. In addition, QFabric supports Data Center Bridging protocols to allow organizations to converge their Ethernet and storage networks. Both Virtual Chassis and QFabric technologies are designed to address the east-west traffic of today s data centers while reducing complexity and lowering costs. Unlike other data center network architectures, Virtual Chassis and QFabric technologies provide maximum performance at scale with no single point of failure and maximum resiliency. 4
Taking the Next Steps If you have not yet moved to a flatter network architecture, the time has come to re-evaluate your posture particularly if you have any expectation of participating in the next wave of highly virtualized business services. A multi-tiered network is simply not going to deliver on the performance, resiliency, agility and availability required for next-generation applications and business services. Once you recognize the opportunities and benefits that can be achieved through a new network architecture, you then need to assess the specific technologies available to you and evaluate the approaches of the various vendors. In making those assessments and evaluations, you will find that Juniper Networks has been and continues to be a pioneer and market leader in building network solutions for virtualized and cloud environments. With Virtual Chassis and QFabric technologies, Juniper offers two options, depending upon your needs, with solutions that deliver performance at scale. By reducing the number of devices and networking tiers in your infrastructure, Juniper s Virtual Chassis and QFabric technologies eliminate complexity in the data center, delivering better application performance and an enhanced user experience, with better economics for your business. Now is the time to consider Juniper Networks, please visit www.juniper.net to get started. 5