Building the Next-Gen Intelligent Network

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Executive SummaryExecutive Summary

Enterprise networks are coming under increasing stress. What was once only an asset used to share corporate resources on corporate computers across an organization is today evolving into the means by which qualified employees and customers access needed company information from any place at any time from any device.

To manage the growing need to disseminate information to end users and customers on an on-demand basis, corporate IT organizations are increasingly turning to the use of cloud computing and virtualization. Increasingly, the traditional corporate network is fading as the network of choice; today, employees and customers alike choose to connect to corporate resources through their own personal devices, not only in the office, but remotely over the Internet as well.

As a result, CIOs find themselves creating networks that provide access to all users—on demand—regardless of where they are located or the means they use to access information. Keeping the network secure and setting priorities on the use of personal hardware is a major issue for CIOs. Moreover, as

advances in personal device technology drive an increasingly skyrocketing demand for this type of access, CIOs must also address the need to provide increased capability without associated skyrocketing budgets.

The trend toward the increasing accommodation of all types of mobile device access, the use of cloud computing, and the use of virtualization has a momentum of its own. More and more companies find that they need to flex and adjust to incorporate these capabilities into their networking business models or else fall behind competitively.

Enter: the intelligent network. Imagine a network that can manage input and interfaces from a variety of end users and customers regardless of the type of access. Imagine developing an application within the network, which simultaneously acts as a friendly front end while it manages access points and devices. Such an intelligent network will distribute information and applications to the right user at the right time—on demand. It is a sophisticated response mechanism that is always ready, and one that can expand as future requirements demand.

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Overview

The Intelligent Network is on its way. Today’s modern knowledge workers and consumers demand it. It will manage input from a variety of devices and users and do it on demand. CIO’s will realize new freedom. They will be freed from working on project-to-project work and allowed to focus on IT innovation in their companies.

The answer lies in the development of the Intelligent Network. Here is what to expect:

• The triumvirate of BYOD, cloud computing, and virtualization are rapidly changing enterprise networks and must be embraced as IT evolves

• While care must be taken to keep networks secure, Incorporating this triumvirate of technologies can reduce costs and improve network value

• In the coming era of intelligent networks, smart phones, media tablets, and personal media players used on the Internet will exceed the size of the total PC market

• Today’s new knowledge workers want to work in the same way that they live, that is, using the Internet to communicate and maintain relationships

• IT departments need to securely deliver sensitive data on IT-owned and employee-owned devices

• Virtualization simplifies infrastructure and makes it more efficient

• Cloud computing provides decreased infrastructure costs, economies of scale, and IT (corporate) flexibility

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Overview

In addition, the Intelligent Network becomes the CIOs allay. The 2011 Ovum report, The Intelligent Network and the Future of the CIO, says this: “An intelligent network can transform the role of the CIO. In a truly dynamic network environment, the CIO is freed from project-by-project resource building and allocation. Essentially, IT becomes decentralized, and the CIO is able to focus on innovation and matching IT capabilities with business and user requirements to a greater degree than had previously been possible.”

Technological innovations are driving changes in business models at a rapid pace. One of the primary driving forces is the widely expanding adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) computing. Work is becoming less of going to a place and more of an activity to be performed from anywhere. A Cisco® report states: “Two-thirds of employees believe they should be able to access both work and personal information using company devices at any time from any location.”

Added to this is the growing expectation of employees to use their personal devices to access corporate networks. New mobile devices make it easier for employees to use social media to collaborate. As a result, more and more companies find that employees want or need access to secure corporate networks through their personal laptops, tablets, and smartphones just to do their jobs.

And this trend is only bound to continue. Global smartphone shipments now exceed personal computer shipments and by the end of 2017, IDC predicts 87% of all connected device sales will be tablets and smartphones. An Ericsson Mobility report predicts that by 2019 there will be more than 5.6 billion mobile broadband subscriptions globally. That’s just for smartphones. Add to that the increasing trend of employees to use tablets and personal PCs for work, which is estimated at 40% of consumers employed by large corporations.

If Ubuntu had its way, employees would embrace BYOD with a single device for personal and work use—a smartphone running on a single operating system with the computing power of a desktop computer. The prototype—called the Edge—already exists. It works like any smartphone. But when connected to a docking station, it becomes the user’s work computer or home computer. One device, employee-owned, used to manage business and personal matters.

Whether the Ubuntu platform gains traction remains to be seen. However, a Gartner survey of knowledge workers that found that “33% of respondents used their personal devices

while at work during the past 30 day (of the date of the survey) to access social networking sites such as Facebook.” And a separate study found that “workers report using an average of four consumer devices and multiple third-party applications, such as social networking sites, in the course of their day.” (Dell)

Another quite comprehensive study on BYOD, conducted by Ovum for Logicalis, the international IT solutions and managed services provider, discovered that, in the 17 countries researched, an average of 57.1% of full-time employees engage in some form of BYOD. This trend is greater in high-growth markets (Brazil, Russia, India, UAE, and Malaysia) as opposed to mature markets such as the United States, the study says.

The study suggests that employees see BYOD as a way to get ahead in their careers, more so in high-growth markets (79%) than mature markets (53.5%). In either case, employees believe that constant connectivity to work applications enables them to do their jobs better.

However, the attitudes of the mature markets will increasingly come into line with those of the high-growth economies, the study says. This is because mature markets tend to be cautious at first. As more and more employees discover the benefit of improved connectivity with BYOD, they will begin using it to the benefit of the employer and their own careers. This means that employers need to prepare for BYOD.

BYOD

Hardware virtualization or platform virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual Hardware virtualization or platform virtualization refers to the creation of a virtual machine that acts like a real computer with an operating system. Software executed on these virtual machines is separated from the underlying hardware resources.

Desktop virtualization is the concept of separating the logical desktop from the physical machine. One form of desktop virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), can be thought as a more advanced form of hardware virtualization. Rather than interacting with a host computer directly via a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, the user interacts with the host computer using another desktop computer or a mobile device by means of a network connection, such as a LAN, Wireless LAN or even the Internet. In addition, the host computer in this scenario becomes a server computer capable of hosting multiple virtual machines at the same time for multiple users.1

Virtualization allows enterprises to simplify infrastructure and make it more efficient because it allows a company to deploy applications faster, resulting in increased availability and performance. This allows operations to become automated resulting in IT that’s easier and less costly to own and manage.2

Consumer technology is, in many cases, becoming as efficient and cost effective as it business equivalents. As a result, consumer technology—as evidenced by the BYOD phenomenon—continues to find its way into enterprise computing environments. This creates what is commonly referred to as a heterogeneous computing environment, that is, a computing environment that uses hardware and system software from different vendors. The demand for increased heterogeneity in computing systems is partially due to the need for high-performance, highly reactive systems that interact with other environments.3

This, in turn, gives rise to the need for virtualization. One of the primary concerns for the CIO in a heterogeneous computing environment is the need to prevent the loss of data while simultaneously providing a secure environment for the many devices accessing the system.

In a Dell white paper, consumerization is defined as the migration of consumer technology into enterprise computing environments. According to the paper, “Desktop virtualization will become a primary model for organizations to securely drive consumerization. By storing data and applications on the server in controlled standardized images, desktop virtualization combines the benefits of corporate images, centralized storage, centralized management and policy enforcement with the freedom to use a wide variety of company and employee provided devices.”

The paper goes on to say that “virtual desktops, as well as web-based application portals, allow users on a wide variety of devices—including smartphones and tablets—to access corporate resources efficiently and securely and to move between devices.”

Dell’s Tech Page One: Insights from the evolving world of tech4 has this to say about virtualization:

“Most businesses expect to see tangible benefits from virtualization, ranging from more efficient deployment of IT personnel to greater speed in deploying applications. A VMware global survey that captured the perspectives of customers before they virtualized found:

• 47 percent expected to do more with less IT staff

• 38 percent believed they would be able to deploy new applications more quickly

• 29 percent expected end users to gain the ability to access applications from anywhere

Virtualization

1 http://en. .org/wiki/Virtualization2 http://www.vmware.com/virtualization.html3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_computing

4 http://www.techpageone.com/technology/strategy-tips-for-smooth-virtualization/#.UhEuKZAo6wl

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IT managers should expect these kinds of gains, but each phase of virtualization comes with its own particular benefits.

• The first phase, which mainly involves virtualizing to consolidate servers, typically saves money on capital expenditures because fewer servers are needed to run the same number of workloads.

• Businesses embarking on the second phase of virtualization, which involves leveraging virtualized servers for business-critical applications, begin to see reductions in operating expenses.

• The final phase — when 70 percent or more of the hardware is virtualized — allows businesses to deliver on-demand services such as infrastructure-as-a-service. Benefits include enhanced agility and competitive advantages for the business.”

• Virtualization reduces hardware costs because it reduces the number of servers needed to provide a given number of applications or a given amount of data. There is a green aspect to virtualization inasmuch as fewer servers require less energy. It also enables higher hardware utilization rates because each server supports enough virtual machines to increase its utilization to as much as 80%. Also, virtualization will ease the required support that system administrators would need to provide, freeing them from firefighting work and allowing them to concentrate on more strategic administrative matters.5

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Virtualization

5 http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/virtualization-for-dummies-cheat-sheet.html

Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale, much like the electrical grid over a network. The basis of cloud computing includes the concepts of converged infrastructure and shared services.

Cloud resources are usually shared by multiple users to maximize the effectiveness and dynamically re-allocated as needed. For instance, a cloud facility could serve European users during European business hours with one specific application while the same cloud facility could be reallocated to serve North American users during North America’s business hours with a different application. This will help maximize the use of computing power, thereby reducing costs by requiring fewer additional resources, such as power, air conditioning, rack space, for the same functions.

Cloud computing allows an enterprise to move away from a traditional CAPEX (capital expenditure) model, in which the company buys the computing equipment, to the OPEX (operational expenditure) model, in which the company shares cloud infrastructure on a pay-as-you –go basis.

Thus, cloud computing can avoid upfront infrastructure costs and allow a company to deal with projects that differentiate the business from competitors rather than dealing with infrastructure. Proponents also claim that cloud computing allows enterprises to implement applications faster, providing improved manageability and less maintenance, thereby enabling IT to more rapidly adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable business demand.6

Cloud computing provides a number of advantages. Among them are:

• Economies of scale, which allows companies to increase volume output or productivity with fewer people, thus reducing the cost per unit, project or product plummets.

• Decreased infrastructure costs through a pay-as-you-go arrangement, thus eliminating capital expenditures on hardware, software or licensing fees

Cloud Computing

6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

• Worldwide access to the cloud via the Internet

• Streamlined processes through improved accessibility

• Monitor projects more effectively. Stay within budget and ahead of completion cycle times.

• Reduced personnel and training requirements

• Improved flexibility and agility

But to use the cloud, to take advantage of anything that is hosted in the cloud, whether virtualized services, data storage, or unified communications, the underlying structure must be sound. That structure is, in every case, the network.

BYOD, virtualization, and cloud computing are all but guaranteed to deliver cost efficiencies to any organization, but the value of these trends will be quickly nullified if the underlying network is not intelligent enough to monitor data traffic, be optimized in a way that prioritizes certain types of data, and be secure enough that it is as safe as if it were stored on the corporate premises.7

The challenge today is to bring all of these changing technologies together into a functioning, efficient intelligent network in a cost-effective manner. To achieve this sophisticated level of connectivity, companies will increasingly need to partner with vendors who can put together the network skeleton on which the virtualized, cloud computing enterprise can grow. Companies need to look for vendors that can provide the connectivity needed to create flexible, agile access to corporate networks and the Internet.

Cloud Computing

7 paraphrased from http://www.slideshare.net/BTGlobalServices/beyond-the-cloud-op-ed

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