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THE
SKY’S
THE
LIMIT
From personalized networks to
hyperscale data centers, a look at what enterprise
can expect from the ever-evolving cloud
T
oday’s enterprise is more virtual and connected than ever. And when it comes to managing the resources and processes that make things happen, traditional models and systems no longer apply.The recession forced companies to look inward to survive. They cut costs, learned to do more with less and invested in technologies to streamline their operations and automate key financial and business processes.
Companies now own less infrastructure, inventory and manu-facturing equipment than before. They outsource everything from customer service to supply chain, and much of their workforce is not even on full-time payroll. They operate on more flexible models for better agility and profitability, assembling resources rapidly to address challenges, and disassembling them just as quickly.
Increasingly, businesses also look externally for innovations— to call centers and third-party logistics providers for fresh customer
engagement models; to outside design partners and knowledge workers for product and service innovations; and to contract manu-facturers to assemble products more efficiently.
“Business is no longer about just executing a process within a company, but across an entire value chain,” says Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, the preeminent enterprise IT analysis, research and consulting firm. “It’s not only about the intelligence within an organization, but the unprecedented intel-ligence of multiple networks that are developed through dynamic communities.”
To succeed in today’s more complex environment, businesses need to adopt a new approach to resource management. “Today’s business models demand higher levels of agility and knowledge frameworks,” says Tim Minahan, CMO, Cloud and Line of Business at SAP, one of the world’s largest software companies. “And the only way to enable this is through dynamic communities that connect you with the applications, intelligence and partners you need to discover, connect and collaborate in the simplest way possible.”
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S3 Businesses have always capitalized on technological advances. Client-server technology and desktop applications increased pro-ductivity and made information sharing more efficient. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications automated key business processes and enabled collaboration across the organization.
“The next wave of business innovation will come from extend-ing these processes and systems beyond the four walls of the enterprise,” Minahan says. “Networks are the game changers.”
Personal networks from Facebook to Uber have made it simple for consumers to shop, share and consume. When shopping on Amazon, for instance, consumers don’t worry about connecting to individual merchants, banks or credit card companies. It’s all done for them within the network.
Businesses can enjoy similar agility and efficiencies by leverag-ing networks to manage resources in simplified and dynamic ways.
“SAP brings the connectivity, simplicity and insights of personal networks to the business world,” Minahan says. “We provide the world’s largest and most global network of digitally connected cus-tomers, suppliers and other partners to help businesses collaborate more efficiently, organize and adapt resources more quickly and innovate processes and business models in entirely new ways.”
SAP’s business network is the world’s largest, with more than 1.6 million connected companies in 190 countries, transacting over $600 billion in commerce on an annual basis. Minahan notes that the SAP business network provides a simple and scalable way for companies to discover, connect and collaborate with the trading partners and resources they need to operate in today’s complex business world. Among other things, it enables dynamic discount-ing that can free up funds for R&D and expansion, and facilitates contingent workforce management to control the highly specialized resources needed to develop next-generation products.
“With a few clicks, companies can shop for goods and services, place and manage orders and pay for them electronically,” he says. “They can view and manage spend across all major categories, and
manage their entire workforce—temporary and full-time employees alike. And they can engage customers across multiple channels, all through a single connected platform.”
Minahan concludes that it is only in a networked environ-ment—one that SAP provides—that businesses will be able to avail themselves of the new and crucial processes that can drive innova-tion across their operainnova-tions.
ANY TIME, ANY PLACE, ANY CLOUD
The past decade has seen enterprises take advantage of the agility of software-based computing at an accelerated rate, with server virtualization making computing resources capable of being configured in the cloud in minutes. However, the virtualization of networks has not kept pace with other technologies.
For cloud services to thrive, the network infrastructure must become as dynamic as computing infrastructure, says Sunil Khandekar, Founder and CEO of Nuage Networks, an Alcatel-Lucent venture focused on creating software-defined networking (SDN) solutions.
“What concerns CIOs right now is that networks are static,” says Khandekar, who knows that CIOs want to build cloud infrastructures where the network is as consumable as computing. “The network configures itself. You define the rules once at a policy level and, after that, it’s automated. That’s exactly what Nuage gives them.”
Operating as a startup venture funded by Alcatel-Lucent and meant to deliver massively scalable SDN solutions, Nuage Networks has tackled the operational challenges of network provisioning for the cloud with its focus on abstraction, automation and boundary-less networking. This automation allows network provisioning to be zero-touch and error-free.
Khandekar adds that Nuage Networks delivers IT admins com-plete control over all users and applications, as well as full visibility into their network assets regardless of the location of the workloads. “Cloud is about instant gratification: ‘I want my applications and I want them now,’” he says. “The goals of our SDN solution are to simplify network operations, increase agility and accelerate deploy-ment of new services—all without sacrificing security and control.” Freedom of choice is also a consideration. To hit the mark, the right SDN technology must work seamlessly with an organization’s network and virtualization infrastructure, as CIOs are increasingly wary of being locked into vendors’ proprietary technologies.
Nuage Networks’ Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) recently extended the benefits of SDN automation to wide area networks (WAN) and remote locations with its Virtualized Network Services (VNS) solution, so that businesses can create secure network con-nections instantly and initiate them when and where new business applications need to connect to in the cloud. Nuage allows such connections to be made over any network, whether a private VPN or over the Internet, using commercial, off-the-shelf Intel x86 platforms. SDN also comes with the promise of cost savings. “We’ve dem-onstrated we can provide over 50 percent reduction in operational expenses, 10 times improvement in turn-up and response time to changes and a ten-fold reduction in configuration errors because it’s automated,” Khandekar says. “It’s a big deal.”
In addition to funding Nuage Networks, Alcatel-Lucent is investing in its Enterprise Internet Protocol (IP) Communications solution to provide open interfaces that allow enterprises to connect applications with voice and video services. “Our solution brings a
Personal networks from Facebook to
Uber have made it simple for consumers
to shop, share and consume. When
shopping on Amazon, for instance,
consumers don’t worry about connecting
to individual merchants, banks or credit
card companies. It’s all done for them
within the network.
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S5
Web platform approach with APIs to enterprise communications,” says Michael Lambert, Senior Director, Enterprise IP Communica-tions SoluCommunica-tions. “For the user, it provides choice of application and consistent services across different applications.”
This platform is a challenge to the incumbent vendors who control the application environment tightly through commercial and technical restrictions in their vertically integrated delivery models. In contrast, Alcatel-Lucent provides a fully open Web platform to provide communication services for the mobile and Web enterprise applications that fit the business need, while continuing to ensure quality and continuity of service for traditional Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and Unified Communication (UC) use cases.
“Users don’t care about how the infrastructure lets them make calls, but IT does,” Lambert explains. “Infrastructure decisions drive cost and flexibility, and the benefit for the IT department of a common communications platform is that it’s possible to deliver the choice their user community demands while improving costs.”
Lambert adds that Alcatel-Lucent’s approach is unique because it brings scale and openness to a market where most major enter-prise vendors are offering closed environments targeted at smaller enterprises. “We are unique in packaging these capabilities into an open, flexible platform,” he notes. “We’ve invested heavily in the optimizations that meet large-enterprise market requirements for functionality, multi-vendor support and scale.”
REINVENTING THE MODERN DATA CENTER
Focused as it is on increasing agility and cutting costs, another new frontier for enterprise IT is the possibility of leveraging the tech-nologies pioneered in the public cloud that, in the past few years, they’ve seen radicalize the industry.
Business IT has looked on in awe—and with envy—as cloud businesses such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft threw millions of research dollars into re-architecting infrastructures to create a new way of building and operating hyperscale data centers, in an approach known as Web-scale IT.
“Until recently, these Web-scale architectures were unavailable to mainstream organizations, but Nutanix has commercialized these cloud technologies into turnkey IT solutions for enterprises of all sizes,” says Greg Smith, Senior Director, Product and Techni-cal Marketing at Nutanix, a San Jose company founded by the engineering teams that developed the file system software of major public cloud providers.
“Nutanix has pioneered what’s now called hyper-converged in-frastructure, allowing companies to design, build and manage their own data centers in the same manner as Google and Facebook,” Smith adds. “With Nutanix, companies get the same benefits of speed, economics and ability to scale out as the demand increases, no matter their size.”
Smith explains that the big public cloud players were forced to innovate to support their massive businesses. “Cloud operators quickly realized that traditional storage systems, like SANs, were not economically or technically viable,” he says. “They couldn’t achieve the scale they needed with traditional storage, and would have required enormous capital investment.”
Their solution was to reinvent how data centers were architected using intelligent software. “They eschewed specialized hardware devices, and instead standardized on Intel-based servers containing both hard disc drives and flash for storage,” Smith explains. “They
combined that with intelligent software that aggregated the storage capacity across clusters of servers. By doing that, they completely eliminated the complexity and cost of traditional storage, and developed a new data center architecture far more nimble and cost-efficient than is possible with legacy storage and server products.”
Building on the same approach, Nutanix’s flagship product combines storage and computing in a simple hardware appliance that runs the company’s advanced “web-scale” software. Nutanix customers deploy the right number of appliances to meet their IT scale and performance requirements, eliminating the guesswork required when estimating storage needs.
Smith adds that the Nutanix hyper-converged solution is radi-cally simple compared to traditional data center infrastructures, and offers rapid 30-minute deployment, no disruption of ongoing operations, predictable linear scaling to support even massive operations and the use of non-proprietary hardware to lower the total cost of ownership of corporate IT.
The emergence of hyper-converged architecture, which Nutanix has pioneered and leads, is now the fastest-growing segment of IT and, Smith notes, represents a massive threat to the status quo and to incumbent storage solution vendors. “It represents a way to break free from 15-year-old storage technologies that have handi-capped many IT organizations,” he says.
Likewise, Smith points to a study by Gartner Inc., the infor-mation technology research and advisory firm, that predicts that Web-scale IT will be the architectural approach found in more than 50 percent of global enterprises by 2017.
“We are truly at a pivot point in the industry,” he concludes. “Corporate CIOs and IT architects are transforming how they build their data centers by leveraging what’s been done in public cloud infrastructures. This Web-scale approach enables corporate data centers to provide a private cloud with the same self-service capabilities, and the same value, that has only historically been available through the use of public clouds, but with the security and control that comes from maintaining their own infrastructure within their own data centers.” — John O’Mahony
