Courtesy - Network World
Enterprise WANs have changed very little in the last 15 or so years. While
price/bit for the Enterprise WAN has improved somewhat over that time, it hasn’t
increased with Moore’s Law as has computing, storage, Internet access, LAN
switching … and pretty much everything else associated with IT. And while
Internet connections have seen Moore’s Law bring about quantum improvements in
price/bit, the unaided public Internet is still not reliable enough to deliver
business-class quality of service and performance predictability, which is why
the overwhelming majority of Enterprise WANs are based not on IPSec VPNS over
the Internet but instead on private MPLS services from telcos like AT&T,
Verizon and BT.
Starting now and over the next few years, however, the Enterprise WAN will
have a revolution of its own. Closely correlated with the rise of cloud
computing, this Next-generation Enterprise WAN (NEW, for short) architecture
will help organizations move to cloud computing more quickly, but will be
applicable even for those enterprises that don’t plan to use public cloud
services for many years, if ever.
This column will cover this NEW architecture: why it will happen, what it
will look like, the key technologies enabling it, the implications for various
applications, including next-generation applications, the impact on enterprises’
relationships with their service providers, how it enables a smooth migration to
leveraging cloud services, and much more.
This Next-generation Enterprise WAN architecture will happen precisely
because private WANs need a revolution in price/performance to cost effectively
support the next wave of applications and the move on the computing side of the
house towards cloud computing. Also driving this trend it the fact that the
plain-old-public-Internet is not reliable enough for the corporate WAN today,
and that it won’t deliver the necessary reliability or performance
predictability by itself that most enterprises demand from their WAN and
applications.
One undeniable trend of the last several years has been to favor data center
consolidation. This began because of the benefits on the computing and OpEx,
rather than the network. Indeed, this trend put even more pressure on the WAN
(and on the data center LAN, but that issue is beyond our scope). Server
virtualization technology and WAN Optimization technology have further enabled
and accelerated the data center consolidation trend. In fact, these are two of
the technologies that are key to the NEW architecture.
Three additional technologies also play a critical role. Distributed
replicated file service, such as DFS Replication from Microsoft, and similar
file synchronization services (e.g. DropBox and Box.net in the public cloud
world) have been around for some time, but have come into their own more
recently as network bandwidth has become more available and more affordable. One
might argue that this is more of a computing/storage/application technology than
a network technology; there is some truth to that. Nevertheless, we include it
here as one of the key enablers of the next-gen WAN.
Colocation (colo) facilities, and in particular carrier-neutral colo
facilities, are our fourth component. While colos have been around for a while,
and many IT folks are familiar with them for public-facing websites and perhaps
know them as the location for many public cloud services, the nearly infinite
amount of diverse, very inexpensive bandwidth available at colos will make them
a critical component of this NEW architecture.
Our final technology is the newest one: WAN Virtualization. WAN
Virtualization does for the WAN what RAID did for storage, enabling
organizations to combine diverse sources of bandwidth and build WANs that have
20 to 100 times the bandwidth, with monthly WAN costs reduced by 40% to 80% or
even more, and more reliability and performance predictability than any
single-vendor MPLS network. WAN Virtualization is the catalyst of our NEW
architecture.
With the combination of these technologies, Enterprise WANs will have far
lower monthly telecom costs, far higher bandwidth, and will be more reliable. If
that troika alone isn’t enough, this NEW architecture also delivers lower OpEx
(people) costs, significantly better application performance and, just as
importantly, better application performance predictability. It will enable
next-generation applications, e.g. HD videoconferencing.
This architecture also enables benefits and changes beyond those to the WAN
itself. It can enable further server consolidation, up to the elimination of all
branch-based servers if desired. It will facilitate the centralization of
network and IT complexity, e.g. for Internet access and remote site backup.
It will allow enterprises to leverage cloud computing – public, private or
hybrid – in an incremental, secure and reliable way. Enterprise WAN managers can
prepare and enable their WAN for the move to private or public cloud computing,
at whatever pace the computing side of the organizations wants to go, without
sacrificing the network reliability and network security they have today.
By doing all of these things it helps lower overall IT CapEx and OpEx, not
just networking OpEx. Wide Area Network design is, for the first time in a long
time, strategic.
One of the most beautiful points is that most of this next-generation network
upgrade pays for itself out of the WAN OpEx budget. It also provides a long-term
way to leverage Internet economics and Moore’s Law, giving enterprises a way to
cost effectively scale their WANs and leverage new WAN technologies, even those
that are consumer-oriented, as they appear. It gives enterprises leverage with
their telecom service providers for the first time.
Just as cloud computing is making now an interesting and exciting time to be
on the computing side of IT, the confluence of these five technologies - server
virtualization, WAN Optimization, distributed/replicated/synchronized file
services, colocation and WAN Virtualization – is making this an interesting and
exciting time for the Enterprise WAN.
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