In about a month, we will publish Jim’s report entitled “The 2010 Cloud Networking Report”. That report will talk about the WAN, LAN and management challenges associated with supporting cloud computing and will also discuss some of the emerging solutions. Included in that report will be an analysis of the responses to an RFI that was recently distributed to several networking vendors. In this newsletter we are going to discuss some of the contents of that RFI and give our readers a URL that they can use to download a copy of the document.
Previous newsletters have mentioned an RFI that Mike Fratto and we created and distributed.
The focus of the RFI was data center LAN switching and the RFI was based around a real enterprise IT organization. The company was referred to in the RFI only as SmartCompany. We didn’t reveal the real name of the company because we didn’t want them to be hounded by sales folks. The scope of the RFI was expanded somewhat from just the SmartCompany environment so that it also encompassed the needs of the vast majority of Global 2000 IT organizations.
The RFI contained a brief description of SmartCompany’s long-term goal to build a dynamic data center computing infrastructure that can provide each application and network service with the required resources even as the demand for each service fluctuates dynamically. As part of that goal, SmartCompany envisions an end state in which the demand for infrastructure resources can be met with the instant-on, real-time delivery of virtualized network services. As noted, we feel that this goal, while clearly long-term, applies to the vast majority of Global 2000 IT organizations.
The RFI contained two design options. One option was that SmartCompany would implement a greenfield data center. We stated in the RFI that the new data center needs to be in production on July 1, 2011. The other option was to suggest a data center network that would be in production by July 1, 2011 that is based on an evolution of SmartCompany’s existing data center network toward what the respondent designed for the greenfield option. This is clearly a point where reasonable people could disagree. For example, option two is appealing because it would allow SmartCompany to migrate their existing technology and not have to throw anything away. However, sometimes it can be riskier and even more expensive to migrate the existing environment than it is to deploy a totally new solution. The choice between these two options depends on a number of factors such as how many complex changes would have to occur to migrate the existing network to the new environment.
The RFI contains a number of questions, primarily about technology. There are, however, some questions in other areas such as pricing and partnerships. You can download a copy of the RFI. If you are thinking of redesigning your data center LAN this document should be helpful.
