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Current Filter: Storage>>>>>> Defining Moments Editorial Type: Technology Focus Date: 01-2014 Views: 2479 Key Topics: Storage Virtualisation Networking Data centre Key Companies: Riverbed Key Products: Key Industries: | |||
| Software-defined networking (SDN) is capable of changing the way data centres are architected, says Paul Coates of Riverbed. But the sea change doesn't stop there - IT must prepare itself for a fully virtualised network and ultimately the software-defined data centre itself The world is littered with technologies that once seemed promising but ultimately failed to transform our personal lives or businesses. In some cases the technology was flawed or prohibitively expensive, and in others it was simply a matter of a lack of support from other industries. 3D television, for example, has been hyped as providing an immersive viewing experience, and yet it has made only limited inroads into living rooms throughout the world. Lack of programming and reluctance among viewers to wear the requisite glasses has stunted the growth of this promising industry, while other innovations such as tablets have taken society by storm. Just as television viewers are hesitant to spend a few hundred extra dollars for a feature that might ultimately be useless, businesses are equally reluctant to spend hundreds of thousands on revamping their data centres without good reason. And yet with words like "the cloud" and "virtualisation" making their way up the corporate ladder over the last decade, it's impossible to ignore the march of technical progress. The latest of these buzzwords is software-defined networking (SDN). But is SDN merely another expensive addition to the data centre, or is it really a disruptive new way of architecting network functions?
GAME CHANGER SDN thus simplifies physical network infrastructure and centralises management of traffic and application delivery. Administrators can quickly shift resources from one area of need to another as they deal with changing business requirements, reducing redundant and underutilised network elements.
SDN AS STEPPING STONE SDDC is the outcome of a pattern already familiar to IT administrators that began with server virtualisation. It isn't just about multiplexing several workloads across general-purpose machines. More importantly, a server virtualisation offers an abstraction that's just right for the data centre: provisioning, moving, snapshotting, and rolling back are thorny in hardware, but easy in software. A "software-defined computer" changes the operational model and streamlines management of workloads. Next on the virtualisation path were desktop computers. These have traditionally required manual installation of each software program a user needs. Over the last decade, however, applications have been streamed to users from internal servers or even been provided online as web-based applications. Now completely virtualised machines are commonplace, where even the underlying operating system actually resides on a server outside the user's physical machine. Now, virtualisation is coming to the network. Networks have been built with various kinds of limited virtualisation for some time now. Virtual LANs allow physically separated network segments to be grouped logically, and virtual switches allow a single server to mediate traffic between multiple virtual machines. Yet full-scale network virtualisation is still in its infancy.
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