By Shamil Fernando, Systems Engineering Director, APJ, Silver Peak
Today, IT managers are required to contend with network performance issues as enterprises continue to deploy virtual machines (VM) in geographically diverse data centres. Critical inhibitors such as network latency, congestion and capacity all bear the potential to negatively impact workload performance across an enterprise.
In the traditional IT environment before server virtualisation was introduced, the workload’s performance depended on coordination across IT teams, spanning application, server, storage and networking. The result was more process, cost and time in meeting business requirements.
Server virtualisation enabled IT to remove some of the barriers between compute and application teams. Now, network virtualisation, and specifically virtual network services, is eliminating the barriers separating the networking team from the rest of IT. It is allowing application owners to gain greater visibility and control over their applications while making networking teams even more efficient.
By separating network services from physical equipment and the underlying network infrastructure, these services can also be abstracted and orchestrated as a common pool of resources for end-users. As such, the tools for provisioning, configuration and management of those services can be radically simplified and automated. Network services, once the exclusive domain of networking specialists, can now be virtualised and offloaded to virtual administrators and application owners.
With virtual network services, application owners will have far greater control and transparency into the life cycle of their applications, improving the velocity in which they can deliver services and making networking teams more efficient. The combination of these benefits means virtual network services becomes essential to realising a complete software-defined data centre.
Workload acceleration is an example of a virtual network service that enables applications to perform more effectively across the wide area network (WAN). With workload acceleration, application owners and virtual administrators can select individual workloads from an inventory of virtual machines to accelerate the workload’s performance over distance. Workload acceleration is not just WAN optimisation software, but a tightly integrated component in a software-defined data centre. It brings WAN optimisation technology to virtualisation, storage and application owners in today’s enterprise.
Understanding the Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC)
Software-defined data centres (SDDC) are considered the next evolution of virtualisation and cloud computing, providing an environment to support both legacy enterprise applications and new cloud computing services.
When an enterprise tries to quickly deploy new workloads, the network is often one of the biggest challenges present. The SDDC tackles this problem by enabling IT to decouple workloads from underlying hardware, bringing unprecedented flexibility and control. In short, the SDDC enables IT to create a flexible, agile fabric that can be reconfigured as quickly and efficiently as the workloads that run over them.
SDDC also helps lower operating expenses, and at the same time reduces configuration and deployment errors that can impact the network, thus improving overall uptime. The data centre creates flexibility in how the network is operated, allowing organisations to write their own network services using standard development tools.
Utilising SDDC principles to accelerate application performance
As workloads move throughout a distributed enterprise, specific tools are required to ensure that network limitations, such as bandwidth, latency caused by distance and congestion do not adversely impact application performance. Workload acceleration has emerged as a way of improving application performance across a distributed enterprise.
While the specific workload acceleration techniques will vary by vendor, there are certain key characteristics that typically exist. The first is workload level granularity, which means the acceleration engine should have application visibility at the workload level, giving insight into the performance of all applications running throughout an enterprise.
Secondly, workload independence, which means that a workload acceleration engine should be able to improve the performance of any workload regardless of the application or amount of data being moved over distance.
Finally, zero touch installation, which means acceleration is enabled right from the management console. There is no need for networking expertise or the need to configure complex networking protocols on the physical equipment, such as routers, switches, and firewalls.
Taking agility to a new height
In an agile business, application owners and virtualisation managers need to deliver solutions rapidly. This requires new functionality within the virtual environment for accelerating workloads across a distributed environment.
Workload acceleration is a virtual network service that gives virtual administrators the performance, flexibility, and control they need. By enabling them to maximise the performance of individual workloads in a fast, easy and highly-efficient manner, workload acceleration is a key requirement for any virtual enterprise aiming to deliver on agility and performance today.
About Shamil Fernando
Shamil Fernando is Systems Engineering Director for APAC and Japan at Silver Peak. Fernando has over 18 years of experience in the field of IT, focusing on pre-sales and business development, and is specialised in bandwidth/application optimisation and network security solutions. He has an extensive knowledge on application behaviour and WAN optimisation product.
