RIYADH – IT spending in the Kingdom is forecast to increase 6.6 percent to SR15.3 billion in 2013, the “Saudi Arabia Information Technology Report Q2 2013” published by Business Monitor International (BMI) said. A significant portion of this will be in technologies that will build the data centers of the future. The connected world of today cares very little for the back-end technology and infrastructure that makes it run, and yet demands so very much of it. At the heart of the communications, applications and service delivery ecosystem is the network that has over the past two decades grown exponentially both in size and complexity. The modern data center is no longer just the silent backbone, endlessly toiling away to keep operations up and running. Businesses now see it as an essential platform for innovation. According to Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., a US technology company specializing in data and storage networking products, the data center of the future will therefore be a combination of the most valuable aspects of the physical and virtual layers. Such a data center will give organizations the ability to flexibly deploy data center capacity - compute, networking, storage and services - in real-time, whenever and wherever they need it. The simplified management and elastic nature of such a data center design will also deliver much-improved ROI (due to scaling, scale multi-tenancy and time and money savings), it said. So, for an organization wanting to make the journey to the On-Demand Data Center, the technology partners should focused on delivering a network infrastructure than enables this vision. Cherif Sleiman, country manager, Saudi Arabia at Brocade Communications, said the data center that Saudi organizations should deploy will require a new approach that includes a high degree of virtualization, the combination of physical and virtual infrastructure elements and an open standards based approach which will provide the flexibility to evolve as new technologies come into play. One such technology will no doubt be Software Defined Networking (SDN). Saudi organizations are already expressing interest in how this new approach can radically improve their networks. Brocade believes that scalability and elasticity are among the top criteria for evaluating the success of data center deployments. Accordingly, the company recently unveiled its ‘On-Demand' Data Center strategy as a means to achieve this. Sleiman enumerated the key ingredients of a future-proof data center network, such as: 1. Fabric for the Future A fabric-based network, both at the IP and storage layers, will simplify network design and management to address the growing complexity in IT and data centers today and deliver key features like logical chassis, distributed intelligence and automated port profile migration. Fabric-based networks are more attuned to operate in a highly virtualized data centers to support techniques such as VM mobility within a fabric and across data centers, thereby providing the ideal hardware foundation for the on-demand data center. 2. Virtual Infrastructure Network Function Virtualization represents an industry movement toward software or VM-based form factors for common data center services. Customers want to realize the cost and flexibility advantages of software rather than continuing to deploy specialized, purpose-built devices for services such as application delivery controllers. 3. Controllers The network controller which is implemented in software and tracks the status of the network and provides well-defined KPIs. The complete architecture is built around applications that directly affect the underlying infrastructure and guarantees the best possible application uptime, performance and security. 4. Orchestration frameworks Finally, the entire data center environment must be managed by orchestration frameworks that allow for the rapid and end-to-end provisioning of virtual data centers. – SG
