Strategy is Key to Optimal Bandwidth Expansion
ADVA Optical Networking has advised network managers planning expansions to think strategically about their long-range requirements since expansion is more complex than many consider until they are waste deep into the process and discover that future-proofing systems can be simplified by fully appreciating the goals and options before any purchase orders are issued.
Adding bandwidth, according to the company, is not simply a matter of widening the pipe. More bandwidth equates to greater complexity, faster throughput and improved layering and segmentation to accommodate workloads of various types and sizes. Without fully appreciating how the network will be used, and not just the traffic it needs to accommodate, will be key to avoiding future hasty expansion conundrums or a major overhaul of resources in just a few short years from the last upgrade.
According to Cisco's latest Global Cloud Index, data center traffic is on pace to triple between 2016 and 2021, jumping from an already hefty 6.8 Zbit per year to a staggering 20.6 Zbit per year. At the same time, workloads and compute instances are on the rise, nearly doubling in the data center and tripling in the cloud. But potentially more important for network managers is the fact the workload and instance densities will climb from 2.4 to 3.8 in the data center and from 8.8 to 13.2 in the cloud. This means bandwidth needs are not just increasing overall, but between and within servers as well.
Small wonder, then, that optical transceivers in the 100 Gbit/s range and up are making their way into enterprise networks. Orbis Research reports that the 400 Gbit/s optical market is on pace to top USD 22.6 billion in the next five years, driven by a combination of internet traffic, online commerce, streaming, video, social networking and the rising tide of cloud and SaaS platforms. These devices will not only be smaller, less expensive and draw less power than today's form factors, but they will also be increasingly intelligent, capable of managing and orchestrating the large volumes of data that pass through every second. You can expect them to be more modular as well, which offers a higher degree of flexibility compared to today's discrete optical components.
The main challenge facing most organizations today, however, is not adding bandwidth per se, but figuring out how much bandwidth they will require going forward. Tech Target's Jessica Scarpatti, says that the process should begin with the right questions, namely, what apps are running and what are their service level requirements? While it may be tempting to estimate bandwidth by the number of users, this can skew the results because bandwidth is often a function of how the network is being used, not by how many. A network analyzer will help determine how many bytes a given app is sending per second, which can then be used to calculate the maximum number of simultaneous users for that app.
As more workloads shift to the cloud, it's important for the enterprise to maintain a handle on their WAN bandwidth consumption as well. But as Comcast's Kevin O'Toole noted recently, most MPLS services provide poor visibility into this crucial metric, leaving the enterprise with only a limited capability to track down and correct bottlenecks. Along with optical long-haul connectivity, a key upgrade is the adoption of SDN and NFV architectures, which can be built more around application-centric models than the raw movement of bits and bytes. With centralized management and end-to-end visibility into app performance, the enterprise can adopt a more holistic approach to traffic, resolving congestion and conflicts in real time and in many cases proactively circumventing them altogether.
Feeding the bandwidth beast will likely be a crucial function for the enterprise going forward. But there are right ways and wrong ways. Too much raw capacity with little or no planning and management can lead to bloat and unnecessary costs, but too little leaves the network operator with insufficient resources to provide quality service and good reporting tools to monitor the continual changes in ways that network resources are utilized.
Fiber optics both within the data center and across the cloud can provide the bandwidth you need, but it will take a certain amount of effort to make sure it is utilized in an optimized fashion.
