Application availability for all users, anytime, from any location, on any cloud, is critical in meeting business needs.
Businesses can no longer afford planned or unplanned downtime; applications must be available 24 x 7. When a data center network has an outage, all servers and applications are affected. Statista.com reports that in 2019 survey of over 1000 companies, 25 percent of respondents worldwide reported the average hourly downtime cost of their servers as being between 301,000 and 400,000 U.S. dollars.
The pandemic of 2020 has changed how we live, shop, work, and play, making it even more critical to eliminate downtime. Internet usage has surged; Forbes estimates that it is up 50 to 70% in 2020. Google has found that if a website does not load on a mobile device within three seconds, most users will move on.
The availability and security of applications is the single driving factor for data center modernization. Many disruptors, including application development methodology, clouds, software-defined, micro data centers, automation, and more, must be considered when determining a strategy for modernizing a data center.
Application development is continuously evolving from a traditional “waterfall” approach to an agile methodology. Consider apps designed for mobile devices; there is a continuous development cycle where updates and new features are released on an ongoing basis. With hybrid clouds becoming the norm, applications need to move between on-premise private clouds and data centers to public clouds. Applications developed using containers, while more complex, support the ability to move between clouds. Containerized applications use microservices and must communicate with each other and allow outside users and services access.
With the rise of security incursions, minimizing attack surfaces is critical. A 2016 SDxCentral article states, “The threat from inside is bigger than ever before and is further exacerbated by the fact that around 80 percent of traffic in data centers is now of east-west nature – and largely unprotected. In such environments, once an attacker infiltrates the perimeter firewall, they can lie low, jump across systems with ease, compromise valuable assets, and extract information at their own pace.? Segmentation and Microsegmentation are a way to contain a breach or threat. Determining how applications talk within the data center, called Application Dependency Mapping (ADM), is critical to securing the intra-data center traffic. ADM is also is crucial when deciding which applications move to the public cloud. 2019 research by Fortinet shows that in a survey of 350 enterprise companies, 74% of companies move apps onto the public cloud and then moved them back on-premise.
Big Data is a growing market due to the value that it brings to enterprises. Data gravity is the desire to have applications and data attract more applications and data on a network. Large data sets are hard to move. The need for low latency and high throughput makes it necessary to keep the data and the compute nearby, increasing the number of micro data centers. Gartner predicts that by 2025 the number of microdata centers will quadruple as explained by DataCenterNews.
Modernizing the Data Center Network requires the Network Engineering team to examine the applications that drive the business, not just look at the switches’ feeds and speeds. There are many additional factors to consider, and most important is the business and the applications that drive the company. Planning for the Data Center Network’s future state requires input from the Network Team, Security Team, Application Team, Cloud Team, Server Team, Virtualization Team, Automation Team, and Storage Team. Begin with the future vision; where do you want to modernize the data center network in five to seven years? How can this network better serve the business and no longer be the bottleneck? Then work backward, determine what changes are needed to achieve the future vision. Software-Defined Networking, Automation, Orchestration, ADM, Single Policy, and Single Point of Management across on Premise and Cloud are tangible steps that can be laid out in a roadmap so that the vision can become a reality.
Application development methodology, clouds, software-defined, micro data centers, automation, traffic patterns, security, and more must be considered during the planning phase. It is essential that the business’s needs and the applications that drive the company be the first thing considered when planning the data center network’s future state. The data center network touches so many other technologies that we must include a representative from the following teams if they exist from the beginning, Data Center Network, Security, Application, Cloud, Server, Virtualization, Automation, and Storage Teams. A successful MSP will have experience working with cross-functional groups to create a vision for the data center network’s future state that serves the business and has workshops to generate tangible steps with a roadmap to meet that future state.
Begin with the vision of how the data center network can be a service to the business five to seven years from now. A modern data center may be one where applications can be provisioned in an automated and orchestrated way within minutes regardless of on-premise or in a public cloud. Data center networks can be automated through the use of Software Defined Networking (SDN). SDN architectures separate the control function from the hardware, making it dynamic, cost-effective, adaptable, and ideal for high-bandwidth data centers consisting of multiple locations. SDN solutions are available from various vendors, the most commonly implemented being Cisco ACI, which requires the use of Nexus 9K switches. For those who have more time and programming expertise, SDN can be implemented as an Open-Source project. Very similar to SDN is Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Like SDN, it moves the control of the network to software. However, it does not rely on any specific switches, and it implements the function of the network, such as load balancing, routing, and firewalling within servers. VMware NSX is a common choice of NFV solutions. Switches are still required to move data between individual physical servers within the data center. NFV and SDN in the data center provide automation, allowing the network to be provisioned more quickly with consistency of policy, regardless of location, with increased security through segmentation.
“IDC survey data indicates that 45% of IT staff time is taken up by routine operations such as provisioning, configuration, maintenance, monitoring, troubleshooting, and remediation, whereas only 21% is allocated to innovation and new projects.” Orchestration can take multiple manual or automated tasks and build in policies that can take the place of human approvals reducing the time it takes to deliver an application-ready environment from weeks to minutes. Orchestration eliminates the slow, repetitive, error-prone task that touches compute, network, and storage using automation tools and scripts. Agility, consistency, efficiency in IT operations, elimination of human error, cost reduction, and timesaving are all benefits of automation and orchestration.
Day-two operations provide analytics of the traffic in the data center providing insights into the patterns and ensuring policy consistency. Day two operations software often has a dashboard for easy viewing as a simple way to manage, monitor, and troubleshoot the network. The deep level of visibility available from day-two operation software allows for lifecycle management and proactive troubleshooting with the end goal of self-healing data center networks.
Network analytics is critical to understanding the traffic patterns on the networks. Over 80 percent of network traffic travels east-west in the data center. Once a breach or a threat has affected one server in a traditional VLAN, it affects them all. Segmentation via SDN on the network and micro-segmentation with host-based firewalls provide the zero-trust security needed for high-value workloads. Microsegmentation cannot be achieved without understanding how applications talk to each other. Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) can be used to determine traffic patterns. ADM will reveal outlier traffic that should not exist, allowing for clean-up of legacy protocols or improperly configured networks. ADM will also allow us to model the impact of moving an application to public cloud. This process identifies which applications can safely move to public cloud without creating too much traffic hair pinning back to on-premise.
Planning for the scalability of a data center is always a challenge for companies. Cloud bursting allows scalability of the on-premise data centers during peak demands. Bursting has been a topic for some time. It is now a reality with the use of VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA), which monitors on-premise capacity and triggers an event alarm when the capacity level passes a set threshold, traffic will then burst into VMWare Cloud on AWS. There will be other solutions on other clouds soon; this, coupled with elasticity, can reclaim unused resources optimizing utilization.
Works Cited
Alsop, Thomas, “Average cost per hour of enterprise server downtime worldwide in 2019.” Statista, March 2, 2020
www.statista.com/statistics/753938/worldwide-enterprise-server-hourly-downtime-cost/
Agrwall, Shiv, “Data Center Security Is an Inside Game,” February 26, 2016
sdxcentral.com/articles/contributed/data-center-security-shiv-agarwal/2016/02/
Ping Lew, Kai, “Gartner – The Future of Enterprise Data Centers – What is Next?
DataCenterNews, September 23, 2019
datacenternews.asia/story/gartner-the-future-of-enterprise-data-centers-what-s-next
Beech, Mark, “COVID-19 Pushes Up Internet Use 70% And Streaming More Than 12%, First Figures Reveal” Forbes, March 25, 2020
forbes.com/sites/markbeech/2020/03/25/covid-19-pushes-up-internet-use-70-streaming-more-than-12-first-figures-reveal/?sh=207a50c03104
“Datacenter Management Must-Have: Automation” https://www.hitachivantara.com/go/hitachi-iview-static/automation.html
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