Putting data at the centre of your business

Juniper Networks’ TREVOR DEARING speaks to CXO about managing a data centre to get the best performance.

How can IT managers achieve cost savings and a better data centre performance at the same time, in today's economic climate?

Trevor Dearing. Most data centres have evolved over a period of time and much of the network architecture is consistent with that used in traditional campus networks. Capacity and resilience have been designed into networks by adopting a multilayered approach with a one-for-one redundancy to deliver the same performance in the event of failure as you would expect normally. Equally in a drive to make the data centre more secure and provide protection for users and applications, a very complex security infrastructure has been built in parallel to the core network. All of this adds up to a data centre network that can be very complex and difficult to manage. The challenge is that because of the way it has been built it may not notice just how complex it is because it is what people are used to. By simplifying the infrastructure it is easy to achieve an improvement in performance, security and reliability.

What is the most cost efficient way for companies to overhaul their data centres and how will they achieve the best return on investment from such a move?

TD. Unless you are building a new data centre, it is not always easy to start from scratch. The easiest first step is to move to a more powerful integrated security platform. Instead of racks of separate security devices, a single device can replace the multiplicity of boxes and deliver security as a service to users and applications. The second step is to remove layers of switching from the physical infrastructure. Juniper Networks can reduce the number of managed devices by a factor of 10, so removing physical links and reducing the spanning tree issues. This is achieved through two methods: the first is to consolidate the edge and to deploy virtual chassis technology, which makes multiple top of rack switches act like a single switch. The second is to use a very high capacity switch in the core of the network, which allows us to remove the aggregation layer completely.

What new IT trends are currently influencing the way companies manage their data centre resources?

TD. The big issues are virtualisation and consolidation. The fact that a single server can now do the work of many older devices delivers much more scalability and a reduction in floor space. New virtualisation techniques mean that multiple applications can be run on a single system and this makes much better use of available resources. However, these things are not without risk and need some careful planning. Both of these technologies can have a significant affect on the network and so this should be considered in the design. Higher capacity servers will naturally require more bandwidth and virtualisation will change the security model.

Why are more companies now moving towards a centralised data centre as opposed to a decentralised system?

TD. Some years ago, decentralisation was viewed as the way forward by using all of the computing and storage around the network it was believed that the cost would come down significantly. The challenge with this was that the ability to manage and secure distributed processing and storage was just too high and that centralisation made everything much more manageable. This is especially true in a world of WEB 2.0, SAAS (software as a service) and SOA (service-orientated architecture) where an increasing amount of traffic actually stays in the data centre. This has a major impact outside of the data centre, it makes the use of thin workstations more appropriate, delivering an easier to manage and more secure model. The balance to this is that if the network fails or delivers low performance then the operation of the organisation is directly affected. The reality of realising the benefits of a centralised model is that the network needs to be faster, more secure and more reliable than it has ever been before.

Trevor Dearing is the Head of Enterprise Marketing for Juniper in EMEA. He has worked in the telecoms industry for 23 years in a variety of roles. He began in R&D developing networking solutions for digital CO voice switches, and newly-invented Ethernet technology. His career then moved to a predominantly data networking focus.