Data-center networking was already changing prior to the technology challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, and few areas of the enterprise will continue to be affected more than data centers by those modifications in the future.

That’s because myriad technologies are driving changes in the data center—everything from heavy demand for higher-speed networking, support for a remote workforce, increased security, tighter management and perhaps the biggest alteration—the prolific growth of cloud services.

Cloud is key

“The pandemic shifted many multi-year digital transformation and modernization projects to occur rapidly,” said Alan Weckel, founder and technology analyst with the 650 Group. “The way cloud changed networking 10 years ago is similar to the impact COVID is having now—rapid transitions to new technologies to support new workloads, and humans interacting differently with those workloads. This is especially true in edge data centers.”

With increased work-at-home policies, employees no longer sit in the office just a short distance from the data center, Weckel said.  “Data had to move rapidly, and networking bandwidth and the ingress/egress needed to be adjusted to support remote workers and remote customers. Networking in the data center must now support more cloud applications and services.”

Indeed, the name of the game for enterprise data center customers is the cloud, experts say.

“Enterprises have known for a long time that the cloud model is the yardstick for achieving agility and responsiveness,” said Umesh Mahajan, senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s NSX Networking. “This model is defined by automation at every level and is typically delivered via software-defined infrastructure.”

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When your dev team tells you they are planning to move one of your key applications to the cloud to become a SaaS service, usually one of two things will happen:

• First, they will attempt to recreate the exact functionality with the same architecture running on rented computers in the cloud. Advice: Run away, the project is doomed.
• Second, they will reimagine and re-engineer that application to take advantage of some of the fundamental benefits of cloud computing; in other words, the cloud-native approach.

While it is possible to port traditional applications and data operations directly to the cloud, many SaaS vendors have gained first-mover benefits from embracing a cloud-first, cloud-native architecture. In this edition of eWEEK Data Points, George Demarest, Senior Director of Marketing at Kyligence, explains why he believes the cloud-native approach will win out over a direct software port to the cloud.

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Cisco continues to expand customer cloud-neutral connectivity options, this time tying its Edge Intelligence software with Amazon Web Services’ IoT cloud service.

Specifically, Cisco’s Edge Intelligence software now works with AWS’s IOT Core service to let customers process data from, communicate with and manage thousands of IoT devices and applications linked via industrial operations networks.

Cisco Edge Intelligence runs on Cisco’s IoT and industrial networking family and gathers data from connected devices to create logical flows from the edge into private, public or third-party clouds. For example, if a robotic arm in a remote system needs replacement, it can send telemetry about the problem. Edge Intelligence extracts that data and gives the operational-technology team information it can use to fix the problem.

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While the move to 400G Ethernet has so far been a largely hyperscaler and telco-network event, the ambition for those users, as well as data-center customers is ultimately to  move to at least 800Gbps and possibly 1.6Tbps.

And while 800Gbps seems to be a solid goal for Ethernet networking visionaries, the challenges—such as the optics, power, and architecture required to make the next speed leap—seem formidable.

The need for increased speed in data centers and cloud services is driven by myriad things including the continued growth of hyperscale networks from players like Google, Amazon and Facebook, but also the more distributed cloud, artificial intelligence, video, and mobile-application workloads that current and future networks will support.

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