Fields of Fiber

If you read the last three posts, you know the Fiber Mountain team had a great time at ITEXPO last week. While I hope you enjoyed the change of pace, it’s time now for another news round-up!

There were a lot of great articles in our social media feed over the past week, but it was the headline about L’Oréal that caught my imagination and wouldn’t let go. Read on for another addition to the “digital transformation I never would have expected” list.

Almost a year ago, Bill Miller posted here wondering whether the term “SDN” would endure the way “Ethernet” has, or fade into background invisibility like Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). At the time, it seemed that the term NFV was both more clearly defined and more generally accepted than SDN, but the first article in this week’s roundup actually suggests phasing it out, in favor of a new acronym: SDNF.

Whether the “V” loses its top billing or not, though, it’s a sure bet that virtualization will continue to play a major role in our evolving technology landscape!

My picks for this week’s articles start out with some new technology – the most recent hardware contributions to the Open Compute Project (OCP) from Microsoft and Facebook. Servers and switches are, as a class, old technology, but these designs offer a new spin that will help webscale data centers to keep evolving. Likewise, the third article describes an old technology which is finding new popularity – maybe!

Digital transformation – it’s a topic I keep coming back to, because of how wide-ranging the scope is, in terms of both the impact and options involved. This week's news included a variety of articles discussing the ways in which infrastructure has to change in order to support the changes to processes and services. Infrastructure may not seem exciting, but as this week's articles show, it's an essential component of successful digital transformation.

Several of the articles that caught my eye were from the Brocade team, but for variety’s sake I’m bundling them under the first featured article below. Enjoy, and let me know what you think of the transformation of IT infrastructure in the comments section!

Happy Friday!

This week, I was caught off guard by a lovely little object lesson in the pervasiveness of digital transformation - as you'll see in the first article below. Software is transforming our world in ways that were only science fiction a decade ago, and in practical ways that science fiction never addressed. It’s not just software, either. Hardware has to evolve to support SDx, and the ever-increasing speeds, bandwidths and flexibility that our networks need to deliver!

Digital transformation is a big topic, whether you look at how many different elements are involved in the process, or at how many business leaders think it’s important. Data center infrastructure is one of the elements that is near and dear to my heart, and the latest buzzword to explode is “software-defined data center” (SDDC). Like software-defined networking (SDN), just about anyone you talk to has their own definition of what it entails, but that hasn’t stopped SDN from having a major impact on IT across industry verticals.

While the term was originally coined by VMWare, I now see it popping up in a wide range of articles and discussions, as a way of approaching the question: “How do you structure your data center to enable rapid change, on a massive scale, whenever your business needs call for it?”

These news roundups tend to have a strong focus on new innovations and bleeding-edge technology, which is great if you’re planning a new data center network deployment.

But what about the vast majority of organizations that have an existing infrastructure to maintain, while staying competitive and keeping up with new developments? This week’s articles all relate to the question of improving efficiency and capacity through integrating new technology into existing systems. This approach means extending the life of legacy infrastructure, while architecting new network and data center infrastructure to open up future opportunities.

When I put together these roundups, I look for patterns in the news we've shared over the past week, as well as both my favorite articles and the most popular posts among our social media audience. This week, I had fun combining all of the above! From geography to technology, read on for three "cool" industry stories.

It’s a consistent theme, both here at Fiber Mountain and in the networking industry as a whole - data centers are changing. They’re changing in so many ways, in fact, that it’s difficult to keep up with all the new developments! That’s why the news of UNH-IOL’s new SDN Test Consortium made it to my list of favorite articles this week. Robust vendor-agnostic interoperability testing should make it easier for network owners to evaluate options and choose the best combination for their business needs, although in-house testing will still be necessary.

There are other considerations too, however. David Mazzarese asks “How much fiber will be enough?” and discusses some of the physical infrastructure challenges created by exploding traffic growth, while RFCode shares a timely reminder that old physical assets need to be accounted for in planning the roadmap from present data center architectures to the more agile and dynamic data centers we envision for the future.

VMware pioneered the term “software-defined data center” (SDDC) as a way to refer to the virtualization of all of the hardware in the data center, not just servers. As useful as SDDC is, though, I think the phrase “data center” inherently narrows the view to a singular installation – a data center.

Modern networks, however, can span multiple owned data centers (and closets or “edge data centers”) across the globe, as well as colocation and cloud resources. Over-used as the acronym “SDN” may be, the software-defined network is still our real goal – a coherent network where location is no longer a limiting factor, in which servers, storage, switches and even the physical connectivity between devices are virtualized and centrally orchestrated via software from anywhere in the world.