2011 Cloud Networking Report

The phrase cloud networking refers to the LAN, WAN and network management functionality that is necessary to support cloud computing. In part due to the growing importance and breadth of cloud computing, cloud networking is also becoming increasingly important and broad and as a result, the 2011 Cloud Networking Report is both lengthy and somewhat technical. To make it easier to read, over the last month we have published the report in sections and highlighted in each section a number of key observations and conclusions.

To further increase the readability of the report, today we are publishing a ten page executive summary. We are also publishing the report in its entirety and have included a final section in the report that is a collection of the observations and conclusions from each section of the report.

Even though many enterprise IT organizations have been slow to make a significant adoption of cloud computing the market research that is contained in this section of the report indicates that

 The majority of IT organizations believe that getting better at managing private cloud computing solutions is either very or extremely important.

However, as discussed in this section, in part because of the challenges associated with managing a virtual infrastructure and in part because of the challenge of managing across technology and organizational domains, managing a cloud computing environment is notably more challenging than managing a traditional IT environment.

Relative to the management challenges facing IT organizations, the market research contained in this section indicates that

Two thirds of IT organizations believe that it is either very or extremely important to get better at effectively managing internal SLAs. 

And yet, as described in this section

The lack of meaningful SLAs for public cloud services is a deterrent to the Global 2000 adopting these services for delay-sensitive, business-critical applications.

Another management challenge describe in this section is that

Getting better at doing root cause analysis is the most important management task facing the vast majority of IT organizations.

And yet, as described in this section

The adoption of cloud computing makes troubleshooting application performance an order of magnitude more difficult than it is in a traditional environment.

The cloud management solutions described in this report include the use of:

• Public cloud based solutions - which can provide unique value to mobile workers
• Route analytics – which provides visibility into the routing layer of complex networks
• Dynamic infrastructure management – which allows core services to support virtualized servers
• Converged infrastructure management solutions – which enables IT organizations to reduce the number of management tools
• Orchestration and provisioning – which uses business policies to define a virtual service and to translate that service into the required physical and virtual resources 

The preceding section of the 2011 Cloud Networking Report focused on the data center LAN and its ability to support cloud computing.  As is described in this section of the report, the WAN is notably different than the data center LAN.  These differences include the fact that:

• After a lengthy period in which there was little or no fundamental innovation, the LAN is experiencing broad fundamental change.  In contrast, after a lengthy period in which the WAN underwent repeated fundamental change, there are currently no fundamental changes in store for the WAN.
• In the vast majority of instances, the latency, jitter and packet loss that the LAN exhibits doesn’t have an appreciable impact on application performance.  In many instances, the latency, jitter and packet loss that the WAN exhibits has an appreciable impact on application performance.
• The LAN follows Moore’s Law.  In contrast, the price/performance of WAN services such as MPLS tends to improve by only a couple of percentage points per year. 

The WAN doesn’t follow Moore’s Law.

As is explained in this section of the report, the adoption of cloud computing will increase the rate of growth in the amount of traffic that transits the WAN.  As such,

IT organizations must either make changes to how they use WAN services, or else accept ongoing increases in their WAN budget due to the increased traffic generated by the use of cloud computing.

To help IT organizations implement a WAN that can support cloud computing, this section of the report discusses trends in the use of traditional WAN services, such as the trend to implement distributed access to the Internet.  This section also discusses functionality that IT organizations can use to overcome the latency, jitter and packet loss that is associated with a WAN and discusses a wide variety of alternative WAN services and emerging cloud networking specific solutions.

First generation LANs were based on shared media. In the mid 1990s, companies such as Grand Junction introduced Ethernet LAN switches to the marketplace. A key characteristic of these second generation data center LANs is that they are usually designed around a three-tier switched architecture comprised of access, distribution and core switches. The deployment of second generation LANs is also characterized by the use of the spanning tree protocol to ensure a loop-free topology; the need to primarily support client server traffic; and the separation of the data network from the storage network.

In the current environment, all of the assumptions that went into designing a second generation data center LAN are being questioned. The good news is that IT organizations have a wide breadth of existing and emerging technologies and design options from which to choose from when implementing a third generation data center LAN. That, however, is also the bad news. Having that many options, many of which are still under development, complicates the task of establishing a strategy for implementing the next generation of data center LANs.

This section of the Cloud Networking Report is intended to help IT organizations to establish that strategy. As was the case with the preceding section of this report, this section relies on surveys to quantify the drivers that are and are not motivating IT organizations to change their approach to data center LANs, and to also quantify the steps that IT organizations are taking to respond to those drivers.

The primary focus of this section is on the existing and emerging technologies that IT organizations can utilize to implement a third generation data center LAN. This includes a discussion of the technologies that IT organizations can use to flatten their data center LANs; to manage the challenges associated with the dynamic creation and movement of VMs; and to converge LANs and SANs. There is also a discussion of software defined networks in general and OpenFlow in particular and the potential that these concepts have to be a disruptive approach to LAN design.

The 2011 Cloud Networking Report will be published both in its entirety and in a serial fashion. This is the first of the serial publications. As pointed out in this publication, the phrase cloud networking refers to the LAN, WAN and management functionality that must be in place to enable cloud computing. In order for the report to intelligently describe the networking challenges that are associated with enabling cloud computing, this publication will identify what cloud computing is today and will also describe how cloud computing is likely to evolve in the near term. Subsequent publications will focus on the key components of a cloud network: Data Center LANs, WANs, and Network Management.