Expert Opinion: Speed, power and resilience are what count for data networks in 2012

12 Apr 2012

The London 2012 Olympics are almost here – the ultimate test for athletes and for Ethernet fabric too, according to Manish Sablok, head of marketing for Central, North and East (CNE) Europe at Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.

The surge in people going online to watch the Games will undoubtedly have a massive impact on the Internet. Internet service providers may ration online access by imposing data caps during the event. What’s more, the speed of mobile data connections may also slow down and content such as files and images may be difficult to download to mobile devices.

Enterprises looking to support employees working from home during the Games must therefore look carefully at their infrastructure and its ability to support remote working effectively, making sure they have a fabric that is able to cope. That effort will be necessary not only to keep ahead of the Games this year, but also beyond: due to the rapid consumerisation of enterprises, the need for any-device, anywhere, anytime working isn’t going to go away after the Olympics.

Enterprises must therefore look at their existing networks, to see whether they're up to the mark, ready to cope with the increased strain around the Olympics. So how exactly can enterprises be sure that their networks are prepared?

First, it is critical that your network, including the data centre, can accommodate and dynamically adapt to increasingly demanding workloads by building towards the model that analysts at IT market research company call “application fluency”.

We think Gartner has it right: companies are already taking the initial steps toward application fluency, by looking to deploy a next-generation data centre switching network, one that is more agile and adaptable to the changing needs of the enterprise as well as increased demand.

Second, virtualisation can be a major player in the quest for speed, power and resilience. It has already revolutionized the way that organisations run server applications in the data centre and allows them to migrate dozens of servers from a physical environment to a virtual private cloud. This can boost business continuity and support disaster recovery, which may prove critical over the summer of 2012.

But there is a flip side: virtualisation can also be a major culprit in putting additional stress on corporate networks, which are already under immense pressure from growing numbers of real-time applications and mobile devices.

At Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, we believe the best response to the challenge of 2012 lies in implementing an advanced ethernet fabric.

Network virtualisation enables the data centre switching network to route traffic based on the optimal path in the network and can deliver a switching fabric with extremely low latency. Equally important, a true data centre fabric will automatically adapt to virtual machine (VM) movement, in order to relieve IT of the burden of manually provisioning the network.

This way, data centre networks can adapt to the higher bandwidth requirements of media-rich applications such as video, while at the same time supporting server and desktop virtualisation. In this way, organisations can take the next important steps in providing true ‘application fluency’ across the network.

Many organisations – of all sizes – are already reaping benefits from virtualisation, in terms of lower capital expenditure, decreased operational costs, reduced administrative overheads, greater up-time, higher availability and superior disaster recovery.

As a consequence, their networks will be much better placed to cope during the Olympics – and in the weeks, months and years beyond, as the increasing consumerisation of the enterprise increasingly leads to more of us using multiple devices from multiple locations.