W H I T E P AP E R

S y s t e m N e t w o r k s D r i v e t h e N e x t G e n e r a t i o n o f A u t o m a t e d , D y n a m i c D a t a c e n t e r s

Sponsored by: IBM

Lucinda Borovick

December 2011

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

Today's competitive business environment is changing the nature of the datacenter,

driving the need for more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective approaches than ever

before. One way datacenter managers are meeting this need is by adopting cloud-

oriented approaches to computing, which in turn is placing greater demand on the

system network in terms of speed, flexibility, scalability, cost-efficiency, and support

for technologies such as virtualization.

The datacenter network is in the midst of an evolution from a fixed, data-centric,

client/server topology to an application-driven, dynamic network better suited to the

needs of cloud computing and Big Data. By incorporating greater flexibility into the

network, datacenters can improve their agility and better respond to business needs

and support changing business requirements. This is driving an explosion in high-end

networking equipment, and IDC expects that by 2015, 10GbE will represent 61% of

datacenter network port shipments.

IDC believes that a converged network infrastructure, combining server and storage

networks onto a unified 10GbE fabric, is the most appropriate technology path to

meet the requirements for today's high-performance datacenter applications. Having

server, storage, and network resources working in concert not only brings benefits in

terms of agility and scalability but also maximizes capital investments by reducing the

need to invest in duplicate hardware.

These networking environments should be standards based and best of breed. This

enables enterprises to pick and choose the best available and most cost-effective

technologies and provides future upgrade paths without locking them into proprietary

offerings.

IBM's System Networking business and portfolio, recently expanded with the

acquisition of BLADE Network Technologies, are designed to address these

datacenter needs in a modular, standards-based, and interoperable approach. By

combining network intelligence with compute and storage systems resources, IBM is

working to deliver a unified fabric networking infrastructure that addresses the needs

of today's virtualized, cloud-based infrastructure in a manner that is scalable, cost-

effective, and easy to manage and that provides the flexibility to allow businesses to

be more innovative and competitive in the market.

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S I T U AT I O N O V E R V I E W

One of the most important changes IDC sees today is the trend for datacenters to

migrate to private and public cloud. Cloud computing provides improved flexibility and

scalability as well as operating cost advantages to organizations, but supporting cloud

environments requires a network with the flexibility to support a changing architecture

that is easily managed and open.

C u s t o m e r O p p o r t u n i t i e s

Private/Public Cloud

Cloud computing has arisen over the past several years as a viable option for

enterprise IT organizations looking to reduce costs and increase their operating

efficiency. It includes both public cloud, in which services are provided by a third-party

service provider, and private cloud, in which a cloud infrastructure is built by an

enterprise and used to support in-house operations. In 2010, worldwide public cloud

IT services spending exceeded $21.5 billion, and IDC expects this number to reach

$72.9 billion by 2015.

The emergence of cloud computing is being driven by a variety of factors, including

the ability to pay via a usage-based model without having to overprovision and the

improved ability to deploy new applications and services to the end user in response

to new business requests. A recent IDC study of IT managers indicated that more

than half expect private cloud to reduce the cost of their server, storage, and network

hardware, while a significant percentage also expect it to help them better match IT

costs to business needs and to improve application performance (see Figure 1).

F I G U R E 1

E x p e c t e d P r i v a t e C l o u d B e n e f i t s

Source: IDC's Private Cloud Management Survey, September 2010

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

Signif icant improvement of staf f productivity

Standardization and stability of inf rastructure

Improved application performance

Better match IT costs to business needs

Reduced cost of server/storage/network hardware

(% of respondents)

©2011 IDC #232049 3

Big Data

Another important trend in today's datacenter is what IDC refers to as "Big Data." Big

Data is more than simply a reference to the large and ever-increasing amount of data

being stored in the datacenter — in 2010, over 16,000 petabytes (PB) were shipped

into the market. The real question is what organizations are doing with this capacity.

Under the Big Data paradigm, organizations are constantly updating information

about their customers, prospects, suppliers, and inventory — and acting on it. Data is

no longer simply being stored and forgotten; rather, data of all types is being used to

make proactive business decisions on a daily basis. Supporting this paradigm

requires a fundamental shift in the way data is stored and managed by organizations

and requires powerful real-time data analytics and tools, decision support systems

and dashboards, and automated hooks into the applications that run the business,

such as ERP, CRM, and financial systems.

Supporting Big Data requires fundamental changes in the compute and storage

infrastructure to provide the necessary resources to make these decisions in real

time. It also requires fundamental changes in the network to support the required

levels of throughput, intelligence, and agility.

Maximizing the opportunity for real-time analytics requires an organization to have the

ability to process massive amounts of diverse data and have it move quickly and

efficiently throughout the network. Network performance is imperative with both

consistent ultra-low latency and line rate performance.

Virtualization

Virtualization is one of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing as part of

corporate efforts to reduce capital costs through aggressive consolidation while

boosting asset utilization, and it is a key building block required for the adoption of

cloud computing. This trend is well under way; in fact, IDC believes that in 2009, for

the first time, more new application instances were deployed on virtual machines

(VMs) than on dedicated physical servers. IDC expects that the virtualization trend

will only accelerate and that the majority of all installed server applications will be

running as virtual machines.

C u s t o m e r C h a l l e n g e s

Not Optimized for Cloud/Big Data

In today's datacenters, most individual components are not optimized to work

together. In most organizations, storage, server, and network resources are contained

in separate silos, and these architectures are inefficient and not well suited to support

cloud computing, virtualization, or Big Data. Specific shortcomings in current network

architectures include:

Too much network hierarchy. Current networks are optimized to support

transactional traffic flows (i.e., traffic between servers and end users) and not

newer application workflows that require connectivity from server to server.

Unfortunately, while this design works well for serving applications and Web

4 #232049 ©2011 IDC

pages to end users, it is poorly designed for the connectivity requirements of

cloud computing and Big Data. Larger, flatter networks optimized for server-to-

server traffic require fewer hops between the servers, which helps reduce latency

and increases efficiency.

Complexity at the network layer. Many organizations support several different

networks for servers and storage, which can introduce complexity and the need

to support multiple protocols. These could include LAN (Ethernet), storage area

network (Fibre Channel), high-performance computing (InfiniBand), and a

management network (Ethernet). Distinct networks include not just separate

switching products but also separate cabling, network management, and, very

often, staffing. This architecture is necessary due to Ethernet's "best effort"

nature; however, it is costly and can create duplicative costs within the

datacenter and drive up capital and operational costs. One such redundancy is

the duplicative cables that connect a single server to the Ethernet LAN and the

Fibre Channel SAN. As a result, IDC believes that regardless of the ultimate

destination switch, the focus on reducing cost and complexity will manifest as a

migration to Ethernet for both networks: 10GbE is now available with lossless

protocols well suited for storage traffic (both block and file).

Lack of virtualization awareness. While server virtualization has brought

greater utilization of compute assets, IDC finds that expectations for more

dramatic boosts in operational efficiency often fail to materialize. This is because

the shift to virtualized servers often leads to significant disruptions in a number of

areas, including the overloading of network infrastructure and the

overprovisioning of storage capacity, resulting in a quantum leap in storage

administration costs. Further, conventional networks have lacked the

virtualization awareness required to ensure that VMs can migrate from server to

server, while the unprecedented scale in the number of virtual servers being

supported requires a completely new set of management tools and a rethinking

of the network architecture to accommodate the required traffic patterns. To

create a network architecture that can support these levels of virtualization, the

network must recognize virtual machines and not just physical servers and must

be flexible enough to provide bandwidth, quality of service (QoS), and security to

all virtual machine types without manual intervention.

Intelligence needed at the network edge. Today, innovations such as cloud

computing and virtualization are happening at the edge of the network, where

physical and virtual infrastructures overlap and where storage and servers

connect to the datacenter network. Restricting network intelligence to the core is

no longer sufficient: With virtual services, intelligence needs to be applied at the

edge to treat traffic appropriately. Innovations at the network edge can drive

improvements in a variety of areas, including network virtualization, management

of virtual machines, and security and network management.

Complexity in hypervisor options. Today, datacenter managers have multiple

options in hypervisors. While many enterprise customers associate VMware

products (VMware Server, VMware ESX, and VMware ESXi) with server

virtualization, the reality is that many types of hypervisors are available, including

Citrix XenServer; IBM PowerVM; Microsoft Virtual Server, Windows Server 2008

©2011 IDC #232049 5

Hyper-V, and Hyper-V Server; Parallels Virtuozzo Containers; KVM; and Xen

(open source). To enable IT organizations to choose the virtualization platform

that is most appropriate for the workload, the network must be hypervisor

agnostic, with the flexibility to provide bandwidth, quality of service, and security

to all virtual machine types.

Security Challenges

Security remains one of the top issues that keep CIOs awake at night. As more data

comes online, an increasing amount of sensitive data, such as customer and supplier

information, costs and prices, contracts, and sensitive intellectual property, is at risk.

Organizations are increasingly taking an end-to-end approach to their information

security and as such are requiring security to be an "embedded" characteristic of their

datacenter network infrastructure.

Managing the Whole Environment

As the amount of IT infrastructure in the datacenter increases and as the IT

infrastructure becomes more complex and siloed, managing it becomes a greater

challenge. And yet with the importance of the IT infrastructure to the business, having

the ability to manage it well becomes more important than ever. It is critical to have an

end-to-end application view to understand the status of all resources in the

infrastructure and to be able to pinpoint and mitigate all bottlenecks.

Rigid Network Designs

Agility, the ability to rapidly provision or reconfigure new or existing IT infrastructure

elements, is limited in most enterprise IT infrastructures today. Traditional network

architectures have many layers and are very rigid, making it difficult to rapidly

provision new services. Further, as organizations consolidate their infrastructure

through virtualization, they are currently forced to treat all application traffic similarly.

This has the effect of driving up costs if every workload needs "premium" advanced-

level bandwidth and network services — which defeats the purpose of consolidating

and virtualizing in the first place. The reverse scenario is risky, ignoring the unique

security and policy requirements of mission-critical applications. This can drag down

the infrastructure and severely limit the organization's agility. To meet the agility

requirements and reduce costs, organizations need to maintain the quality of service

for specific application workloads. Additionally, rigid network designs hinder the ability

to scale quickly. IT organizations need the ability to scale the network in equal cost

increments, similar to approaches available in scale-out computing and newer

storage systems. Rigid network designs add additional components and costs to the

network as the network scales.

6 #232049 ©2011 IDC

N E X T - G E N E R AT I O N N E T W O R K I N G M E E T I N G F U T U R E R E Q U I R E M E N T S

M o d u l a r A p p r o a c h

Instead of provisioning server, storage, and networking in "silos," a better approach is

to deploy them in "PODs" or "integrated systems" consisting of optimized systems

with each resource working in concert. This approach not only breaks down the silos

of the traditional approach but also allows organizations to scale their IT infrastructure

in a balanced manner (so the amount of compute power scales hand in hand with the

amount of storage and networking resources required). This improves flexibility and

agility, enabling organizations to scale resources up or down as needed.

F l a t t e n N e t w o r k w i t h a U n i f i e d F a b r i c

A p p r o a c h

IT organizations must enable the enterprise to respond to changing business

demands quickly and economically, which means the network architecture must

support simpler management and migrations. The best approach to accomplish this is

to flatten and converge the datacenter network and to implement a unified fabric

architecture. This reduces complexity and allows IT administrators to move away from

multiple fabrics, each with separate adapters and cabling (which is expensive and

difficult to manage and reduces network flexibility). Network architects favor flatter

designs to maximize network efficiency, reduce congestion, and address Spanning

Tree limitations by creating active/active Layer 2 network paths for load balancing and

redundancy. IDC believes that the trend toward converging network fabrics on

Ethernet is the right technology path for delivering network-edge technology that can

provide the lossless performance and ultra-low latency needed to meet the demands

of today's mission-critical applications.

H i g h e r N e t w o r k S p e e d s

Supporting cloud computing and Big Data requires networks that can handle the

higher speeds needed. As more traffic is introduced into the network, the challenge is

to keep latencies as low as possible as well as increase line rates to keep the network

from becoming the bottleneck.

Figure 2 illustrates the expected growth in higher-speed networking. IDC expects

there to be an explosion in the 10GbE datacenter networking market over the next

five years. IDC expects 10GbE, which represented only 6% of ports shipped in 2009,

to grow to 61% of datacenter network ports shipped by 2015.

©2011 IDC #232049 7

F I G U R E 2

T o t a l 1 0 G b E D a t a c e n t e r N e t w o r k P o r t s S h i p p e d , 2 0 0 9 – 2 0 1 5

Source: IDC's Worldwide Datacenter Network QView, September 2011

Further, 10GbE represents only the next step in an inevitable forward evolution in

networking, with 40GbE just becoming available and 100GbE on the horizon. As

10GbE becomes mainstream at the server access layer, organizations will begin

requiring higher speeds in the core. Organizations concerned with future scalability

and investment protection would do well to prepare for implementing 40GbE and

100GbE technologies in their datacenters. This is particularly true for businesses

looking to drive the lowest latency possible into their systems — for example, financial

trading houses in which millisecond delays in trade times can represent millions of

dollars in lost profits.

While some early implementers are embarking on selective pilot deployments of

40/100GbE switching platforms, IDC expects volumes to pick up in the 2013–2014

time frame as port costs for 40/100GbE deployments become comparable to and

competitive with those for 10GbE deployments.

S u p p o r t f o r S e r v e r - t o - S e r v e r T r a f f i c

Most architectures are designed to support traffic between servers and end users in

the more traditional transaction approach, but with new network architectures, cloud

computing, and big data, traffic flows are now more interactive between elements

inside the datacenter. To achieve real-time business-centric analytics, IT workloads

are becoming increasingly interdependent. New network architectures must be

introduced to handle these new types of traffic, which must be integrated throughout

the whole datacenter.

Customers continue to benefit from the tidal wave of innovation around enhancing

Ethernet. As stated earlier, Ethernet is now a viable option for both block and file

storage. Likewise, similar advances have been made to support low latency server-to-

0

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8 #232049 ©2011 IDC

server traffic. Customers are now utilizing RDMA on 10GbE to support high-

performance computing. The combination of low latency and high-throughput

advances in Ethernet has contributed to the technologies leading installations in high-

frequency trading applications in the financial sector.

S u p p o r t f o r V i r t u a l i z a t i o n

Despite the widespread proliferation of virtualization in the datacenter, most

organizations' tools to support virtualization are sorely lacking. This point is well

illustrated by considering the primary methods of moving VMs in the datacenter today

(see Figure 3). For most organizations, moving VMs is a largely or entirely manual

process; only 8.4% use automated policy tools, half move them manually with the aid

of tools, and over one in four move them manually without the use of tools.

F I G U R E 3

P h a s e o f V M M o b i l i t y

Source: Three Data Centers – One Vision, IDC #DR2010_T2_MB, March 2010

Organizations require superior approaches to manage their virtualized environments,

with tools that abstract complexity and support VM sprawl management, dynamic

workload scheduling and automation, and capacity planning across physical and

virtual systems. They must support end-to-end visibility across multitier application

environments and performance and root-cause analysis. These tools must be

hypervisor agnostic and enable organizations to migrate network policies along with

VMs as they move from server to server.

By optimizing and automating virtualization and including networking resources in this

automation, IT can drive greater efficiencies throughout the organization. It can break

down the silos and enable the "IT team" to work together more closely, enabling more

Don't move VMs (12.8%)

Move VMs manually (27.9%)

Move VMs manually and

using tools (50.9%)

Move VMs using policy tools

(8.4%)

©2011 IDC #232049 9

tasks to be performed by IT generalists and requiring fewer specialized resources to

manage server and storage networks.

I n c r e a s i n g D a t a c e n t e r E f f i c i e n c i e s

A key trend today is to drive increased efficiency into the datacenter. An important

element of this trend is the move to build "green" datacenters. Introducing intelligence

into the network edge can help reduce overall power consumption, which not only

benefits the environment in a general sense but also reduces operating costs. This is

important to most organizations given the current state of the global economy and is

particularly true in geographies with high-energy costs and strict regulations such as

Europe.

Furthering datacenter efficiencies is the ability to provide unified management across

the fabric of network devices. The devices in the network should be managed,

configured, and provisioned holistically.

S u p p o r t f o r S t a n d a r d s

Leveraging a standards-based approach is another important characteristic that

organizations must take into account when architecting their networks. Not only does

support for open standards provide a path for future upgrades and scalability without

locking into proprietary protocols, but choosing a vendor that supports a wide range of

standards opens the door to additional technologies and efficiencies. For example,

support of the emerging OpenFlow standard introduces a greater level of intelligence

in Ethernet networks through a new approach called Software-Defined Networking

(SDN) and can be used to support on-demand "express lanes" for voice and data

traffic that are time sensitive or to combine several fiber-optic links into a larger virtual

pipe for temporarily handling a heavy flow of traffic.

S t o r a g e N e t w o r k i n g

Organizations thinking about their next-generation networks should not forget about

storage networks. For those that have implemented Fibre Channel storage,

implementing a 16Gb Fibre Channel network can provide an upgrade path for the

future. Fibre Channel–based capacity shipped will growth at a CAGR of 42% from

4.6PB in 2010 to 26.7PB in 2015. However, the explosion in storage on Ethernet is

inevitable. File-based storage is exploding with videos, images, and unstructured

content in the era of cloud computing. This storage will grow to overtake Fibre

Channel and reach 30.7PB in 2015. Adding NAS/iSCSI to the mix and FCoE means

that storage on Ethernet will account for two-thirds of storage capacity in 2015. To

meet the needs of converged data and storage networking, Ethernet networks must

be lossless. Network equipment must support the Data Center Bridging (DCB)

standards to ensure lossless operation. IDC believes that IP SANs using NAS/iSCSI

or FCoE enable customers to standardize on Ethernet and maintain the appropriate

service levels for storage workloads.

10 #232049 ©2011 IDC

D E L I V E R I N G T H E N E X T - G E N E R A T I O N D A T A C E N T E R W I T H I B M S Y S T E M N E T W O R K I N G

To address these challenges, IBM has expanded its System Networking line of

products focused on the datacenter. The IBM System Networking portfolio leverages

IBM's more than 30 years of experience in datacenter networking, management, and

integration, as well as IBM's reputation as a trusted partner for network solutions, its

support of leading management platforms such as Tivoli, and its support for industry

standards.

IBM defines System Networking as the integration of intelligence into compute and

storage systems management. This integration brings the ability to maximize

compute processing power to deliver data analysis in the fastest possible time. The

goal is to make a more general management solution for a customer site, leveraging

technology such as the Tivoli Network Manager, Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus, and other

components.

Products offered under the System Networking banner include high-performance IBM

System Networking–branded blade and top-of-rack RackSwitch Ethernet switches,

Fibre Channel SAN switches and directors, partner offerings, and networking

software and solutions. The IBM System Networking portfolio was enhanced with

IBM's 2010 acquisition of BLADE Network Technologies, a leader in datacenter

networking.

IBM System Networking solutions are designed to:

Drive business value. Connecting servers and storage with a high-speed,

intelligent network that is smarter, faster, greener, and easier to manage can

drive improved economics to the business. By improving the flexibility of IT to

more quickly respond to changing business conditions, companies can become

more competitive in the marketplace.

Improve security. The System Networking line includes a full suite of security

technologies, as well as consulting and managed network security services

designed to ensure network resiliency. This end-to-end, multilayered approach

includes Proventia Network Multi-Function Security unified threat management

software as well as threat analysis and prevention offerings from IBM Security

Services.

Support an open, standards-based approach. IBM takes an open, standards-

based approach to implementing converged datacenter network designs to

improve interoperability and make it easier to deploy, maintain, and scale

network solutions. It supports virtualization and cloud computing networking

initiatives, including VMready (with IEEE 802.1Qbg – Edge Virtual Bridging),

OpenFlow, TRILL, and DCB.

©2011 IDC #232049 11

Product highlights include:

IBM iFlow Director. IBM iFlow Director, announced in June 2010, is a software-

based load balancer and traffic director for the IBM BladeCenter. Offering 10GbE

switching and a 10Gb statistical flow balancer, it is designed to handle

bandwidth-intensive security applications at the network entry point for security

and Web 2.0 appliances.

IBM virtual NICs (vNICs). Emulex 10GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter II and Emulex

10 GbE Virtual Fabric Adapter Advanced II are the latest elements of the IBM

BladeCenter and System x Virtual Fabric portfolio. These adapters allow

datacenters to reduce the number of switches required inside the BladeCenter

chassis by allowing each physical 10Gbps port to be divided into four virtual

ports. These virtual ports can also be used to provide VM connectivity without

tying up a physical port for each VM. On top of that, the ability of the IBM System

Networking switches to carve up communications back to the Emulex adapter

provides higher availability, increased security, simpler management, and

maximum performance per vNIC.

Powering IBM Netezza. The synergies extend to the IBM Netezza data

warehousing and analytics solution. IBM System Networking's Ethernet portfolio

is a building block for Netezza, providing a high-speed, low-latency fabric

connectivity infrastructure for high-performance data warehousing and analytics.

C H AL L E N G E S A N D O P P O R T U N I T I E S

C h a l l e n g e s

Like any vendor participating in this fast-moving market, IBM faces a number of

challenges as well as opportunities. IDC believes the top challenge for IBM is proving

how the network helps deliver the appropriate quality of service to virtual traffic.

Customers migrating workloads to a virtualized datacenter environment prefer to

invest in solutions that are shown to be complete and easy to deploy and that have

the full feature set necessary to support a virtualized environment. IBM will need to

demonstrate the completeness of its solution compared with other alternatives

available on the market.

Other challenges include the necessity to demonstrate to customers that their

investment will be sound, not only today but in the years to come. Customers will not

want to invest in technologies that they will be forced to rip and replace in a few years.

To overcome this obstacle, IBM must demonstrate how its offerings are based on

interoperability and open standards and are open to all hypervisors so that customers

understand they will not be stuck with proprietary vendor lock-in down the line.

12 #232049 ©2011 IDC

O p p o r t u n i t i e s

The key opportunity for IBM is to show how the increasing need to support cloud

computing, business analytics, and high-performance computing requires datacenter

support of dynamic workloads and how these dynamic workloads require a modular,

fabric-based approach to networking. By showing the ability of the System

Networking solutions to prioritize traffic for different applications or storage systems

through virtual pipes, IBM can demonstrate the increased flexibility of the system and

the improved ability to support dynamic, virtualized workloads compared with

previous-generation "fixed not flexible" networking approaches.

This opportunity is magnified when combined with the strength of IBM's core

ecosystem of partners, customers, and OEM partnerships. IBM is one of the top

players in datacenter networking, with customers in some of the largest companies in

the world, including many of the leading banks, trading exchanges,

telecommunications, electronics, and entertainment companies, and has a robust

network of solution provider partners and OEM suppliers.

C O N C L U S I O N

Driven by the needs to support cloud computing, virtualization, and "Big Data,"

organizations are evolving their networks from fixed, data-centric, client/server

topologies to application-driven, dynamic networks. Network architectures are

flattening, bandwidth requirements are increasing, and organizations are building

greater flexibility into their networks, all to increase flexibility to better support rapidly

changing business requirements.

The IBM System Networking portfolio is designed to address these needs using a

modular, standards-based approach. It combines network intelligence with compute

and storage system resources in individual integrated systems, enabling

organizations to scale their network in a balanced, modular manner. IBM's unified

fabric networking infrastructure, which is part of the company's Smarter Computing

initiative, is designed to meet the needs of today's virtualized, cloud-based datacenter

in a scalable, cost-effective manner while providing the agility organizations require to

compete in today's global marketplace.

C o p y r i g h t N o t i c e

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