In today’s information intensive economy, bandwidth is a critical requirement - an essential commodity, in the same category as power and water. It must be delivered where it’s needed and when it’s needed on a high quality, constant and reliable infrastructure.
The network is the critical link to achieving a business’s key objectives, but international expansion, mergers, acquisitions, cloud adoption and wide-ranging integration all require network capacity that scales with the business.
You need to be able to flex up the bandwidth when you add those 20 employees and perhaps reduce it when they are moved elsewhere. You don’t need that extra bandwidth in six weeks’ time, you need it on day one and you don’t want a penalty from your supplier when the requirement is throttled back.
Data Centre connectivity
Data centre to data centre connectivity is a significant consideration. Many companies have multiple data centre sites nationally or internationally. This makes high bandwidth connections between data centres critical. Data centre colocation is also important in sectors such as capital markets, where everyone wants to be physically close to the exchange and requires high speed, low latency connections out of the data centre.
One challenge facing data centre operators is the rapid deployment of data centre to data centre connectivity to meet unpredictable demand from cloud applications, and the ability to quickly flex up/down the bandwidth.
This allows businesses to intelligently meet short term additional demands for high-bandwidth applications, such as disaster recovery or data backup. While public cloud services can be tuned up and down in a matter of minutes, traditional network delivery processes can take weeks to deliver connectivity between data centres.
The liquid infrastructure
Businesses need a liquid infrastructure to be able to flex their bandwidth accordingly between sites. From a technology side, Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV), combined with a professional services provider can deliver this flexible consumption model.
NFV describes the process of virtualising the network functions that are traditionally carried out by proprietary, dedicated hardware (like a router appliance, a load balancer appliance, a firewall appliance), and implementing the network functions as software applications on a general purpose server. NFV decreases the amount of proprietary hardware that's needed to launch and operate network services and therefore further reduces the costs.
Meanwhile flexibility, policy management and programmability are the hallmarks of SDN solutions. Using SDN enabled network service provider platforms, data centre managers can fully automate the delivery or flexing of inter-data centre connectivity. SDN also reduces the level of expertise required to configure the connectivity.
Combining SDN and NFV technologies, and driven by self-service portals, allow the instant provisioning of network connections between data centres, expansion of connectivity into new data centre locations, and the scaling of bandwidth in real time – a step improvement compared to the several weeks of traditional networking! SDN-based network management is the key to this flexibility.
This allows an organisation to dynamically self-provision Wide Area Networking according to real time business requirements, which themselves are increasingly driven by user expectations and demands.
Pricing and contracting
This on-demand flexibility also extends to pricing, giving customers the option to choose per-hour pricing plans, as well as more traditional fixed term contracts.
After decades where most advances in networking were focused on delivering ever higher bandwidths, we’re now entering a time were Wide Area Networking becomes just as flexible to deliver and flex as the cloud computing it provides connectivity to.
