From slow lane to fast lane - the networking bottleneck

The phrase 'the network is the computer' was first coined in the mid-1980s, but it's never been more true than today. However, too many organisations have their data centres on the digital equivalent of a B-road rather than a super-highway

In an age when people expect almost everything to be available at their fingertips in an instant, few people give much thought about how that is actually achieved.

It isn't just the applications running in major data centres across the world, or the data that might be served from multiple disparate locations, but the sheer volume of traffic that these data centres need to efficiently handle in order to serve people across the world with the speed and efficiency they have come to expect.

Indeed, while the phrase "the network is the computer" was coined in the mid-1980s, it is even more so the case today. The modern data centre needs to handle traffic volumes that not only continue to grow but which can vary from minute to minute and are becoming increasingly hard to predict.

In addition, with virtual servers almost ubiquitous, networks need to be highly flexible to, for example, cope with workloads that may move rapidly between both virtual and physical hosts, yet need to do so without loss of connectivity. They also have to be secure and capable of prioritising traffic flows in line with business need, rather than technological need.

And very often, the potential bottleneck isn't with the data centre, but the networks that serve both it, and the end-user.

In our research* of major data centre operators, we started off with an assumption that they would all be served by 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) connections, but we were wrong: most of the data centre operators we surveyed were getting by with Gigabit Ethernet - 44 per cent - compared to 34 per cent on 10GbE.

This is important, because not only does it affect the data centre's ability to handle ever-rising volumes of data and requests, but it makes it more difficult to implement other solutions that can help improve efficiency, such as iSCSI storage area networking (SAN). Our conclusion is that the majority of networks serving data centres are busy enough coping with current traffic volumes without adding storage to the mix.

On top of that, the development of software-defined everything, in which hardware, storage and networking can be configured and re-configured centrally, can also help the data centre to better handle peaks in demand and to simplify management processes. Furthermore, it can also reduce the need for specialist knowledge, potentially cutting costs, too.

For many of the organisations surveyed, this really is blue-sky thinking, with almost half responding that they knew little about it. Ipso facto, some 10 per cent claimed to be trialling software-defined networking technology, with increased scalability the number one reason for doing so.

Other reasons why early-adopter organisations are experimenting with software-defined networking included the shift to cloud computing and the need to better support changing business processes: in other words, they needed the extra flexibility that software-defined networking provides because the business was demanding such flexibility.

Those organisations that remain with old networking technologies (five per cent of organisations surveyed had a bandwidth ceiling of just 100 Megabits per second) will find themselves increasingly stuck on the digital equivalent of a B-road, with their meagre networking capabilities acting as a bottleneck preventing the implementation of other technologies that can improve their efficiency.

* Computing conducted an in-depth survey of 100 organisations operating data centre infrastructures, of which 87 per cent represented major organisations with more than 1,000 employees. Respondents were also selected on the basis of their involvement in the planning and management of those data centres, with just under half (48 per cent) either data centre managers or with responsibility for planning and management at a national, global or executive level.