Unravelling network fabrics

Enterprises’ new clothes

However, Gartner analyst Bjarne Munch cautions against over hyping the network fabric space, which he says “is very much an emerging area … with few deployments”. 

“It will be quite a number of years before you see any fully-fledged solutions,” he says. “Products are still evolving and we’re still talking to clients about benefits.” 

And with regard to Juniper’s implementations, he feels these may be the exceptions that prove the rule at the moment.

“Juniper sits into the scheme of things by lifting discussion on higher levels and looking at the entire data centre network as a switch – and Brocade is doing that as well but on a completely different scale – Juniper is a higher scale, but you could argue not for very large networks,” Munch says. 

“It lifts the discussion to the level where you could speak of the data centre network as a fabric, which is why you talk about it as a one-switch type of architecture.“

QFabric lifts it up on that layer where you have that control architecture with policies, router switching, spanning the entire data centre network.

“They have the right architecture but it’s still too early to say it’s completely proven.”

Nevertheless Gartner estimates there are nearly 50,000 data centres in Australia likely to spend about $2 billion this year and next, with some of the money to go on fabrics. It predicts that about 4.4 percent of servers sold within the next 3 years are destined for fabrics, on par with the historical growth of blade servers.

But Munch cautions that fabric’s promise – connecting anything to everything – is retarded by proprietary solutions, conservative data centre owners and under-baked technology.

“But there’s a need to be more dynamic in the data centre and virtualisation is pushing these discussions. Those that would benefit most are [the] most conservative enterprises with very large data centres where they want to manage those resources as efficiently as they can.”

Munch advises resellers to probe how customers handle – or would like to handle – virtual servers. For instance, if they move them depending on power or other tariffs, to follow the sun, put applications closer to users or consolidate resources. That work could be automated and spread over a fabric.

But he says inherent problems with Layer-2 switching over networks aren’t licked, despite what vendors say.

“There’s serious constraints when you talk about how to network data centres on Layer-2 and we haven’t seen too many walk down that path. 

“We have a lot of hype with moving virtual machines between data centres and cloud bursting” but the reality is different,” he says.

Secure fabric

Juniper’s senior manager of data centres, Brian Hutson, sees another overlooked advantage of fabric: security. A certified information security practitioner, he says users bringing their devices into the network means that security is no longer a razor-wire ring-fence around the data centre but must permeate its weft and weave.

“The biggest thing I see is an advantage in visibility because I’m looking at one switch and I’m seeing a lot of the activities in the data centre switching network as opposed to the old, multi-tiered way of looking at firewalls,” he says. 

“We can’t have those firewalls we used to have that blocked off the internet or separated application from database or presentation layers; that’s not going to work with physical firewalls protecting virtual servers. You now need to look at how you protect your virtual environment.”

Hutson says resellers must understand their customers’ data flows before upgrading their networks.

“The customer or integrator has to really understand what is going on in terms of traffic and the implications of moving switches around or consolidating a network from three layers to one layer,” he stresses.

Customers may not understand what the network is doing and if they rush into deploying any switching those issues can be built up alarmingly, so it’s important, he says, to get operations technicians involved at the outset.

Hutson helps resellers and their customers test real data, perhaps captured with a media device in the customer’s data centre and then played back using their apps and devices in Juniper’s lab. So before customers even start their rollout, they should set up a lab in their own physical environment to allay fears and make sure everything is covered.