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Mar 19, 2010 (08:03 PM EDT)
App-Aware Networks Get Closer To Reality
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for each of the first 5,000 downloads. Remember the Sun Microsystems marketing tagline from the late '90s that proclaimed "The network is the computer"? Well, it's 2010 and that still isn't reality. But now it's at least close, and we're seeing very real features and products that suggest application awareness will be central to how networks function in the not-too-distant future. Recent moves by Brocade, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, VMware, and others underscore that switch vendors aren't content with supplying the hardware and software to make a dumb network for carrying data. They're demanding a bigger chunk of the computing market and putting up the R&D dollars to make it happen, investing in technology that lets the network morph into an intelligent, application-aware hub. If networking vendors have their way, the network of the future will control and manage the entire application stack--though they won't get control without a fight. Superfast and low-latency connectivity is letting network gear vendors demand bigger roles. Other enabling technologies include virtualization and processors fast enough and memory abundant enough to allow abstraction of the hardware layer in networks, and eventually storage and other systems, just as it has been for servers. Big vendors are also promising that this "ecosystem" will be controllable from a single point, as well as able to monitor and proactively ensure its own health. It's a realistic long-term vision, but one that must be approached with caution. What's Driving This Bus Server virtualization seeks to decouple compute resources from physical hardware--to make resources stateless. The network plays a vital role here. Before today's virtualization boom, the biggest challenge to distributing compute resources over any distance greater than the dimensions of a physical server was that no network could carry traffic at the speeds and distances required in a low-latency, high-speed configuration. Old-fashioned buses could only take us so far. Now there are new networking technologies such as InfiniBand; Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE); 10, 40, and 100 Gigabit Ethernet; N-Port ID virtualization; and lossless Ethernet. With these, IT can start to create a framework for true network convergence between Fibre Channel (the network for all things storage) and Ethernet (the network for all things IP). This convergence can bring a simplified data-center-wide "fabric" and allow seamless mobility of operating systems and apps among various compute resources. Intelligent, application-centric monitoring and management tools are also critical to this vision. These tools allow for more proactive end-to-end monitoring of all compute resources in the environment and raise the awareness of the network in the context of the medium so necessary corrective actions can be made swiftly. These tools have become even more important in that they aren't external to the compute stack but can be embedded via hooks into the operating system, network, application, and I/O stacks. This improves their ability to be integrated with not only the compute side but also the network itself. Naturally, switch vendors such as Brocade and Cisco, and management software vendors such as IBM and others, want to make the network not only aware of the high demand placed by such compute abstraction, but also put it in control of what gets accessed, and in what manner. When the network is conscious of what use these compute resources are put to, the idea is, the network can intelligently provide resources that are optimized for the task; for example, a CPU-intensive compute environment could be given resources that have faster, stronger CPUs vs. a memory-intensive compute environment getting resources that are optimized for high-speed memory access. Furthermore, vendors are seeking to create a unified "ecosystem" where all compute resources are integrated and able to be controlled from a single point. In the app-aware network, it's the network that will have to monitor the health of the compute environment and the resources it uses and seek to self-govern and self-heal. If a certain application seems poised to fail or starts performing below set baselines due to a lack of adequate resources, whether CPU, memory, storage or throughput, the network will be able to automatically mobilize additional hardware in order to keep the system performing at an acceptable level. On the "Internet-facing" or IP side, networks have become increasingly self-healing as well, thanks to intelligent monitoring and management software that can detect and isolate problems. In general, these systems probe the content being served from the compute resource. Expect this functionality to converge with server functionality one day.
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