* How the wide area is increasingly important to data centers
Should the WAN be considered part of the data center? Old-school architects may not think so, but designers of next-generation data centers recognize that the network is an integral component.
“The WAN is clearly a strategic piece of our data center,” says one IT executive. That’s because data center consolidation and relocation mean that far fewer employees are co-located with the data center – which increases the criticality of the WAN.
“The number of people at [our] headquarters is shrinking radically because of the cost of facilities,” says the CTO of a large healthcare company that employs just 800 of its 24,000 employees at headquarters. “We’re looking for efficiencies. Some employees are going to work from home. We turned a major data center’s lights out. We’re making decisions to shift people and facilities where they make sense.”
Companies are increasingly “pushing” applications out to their remote workforce, as well as adding new applications – such as IP telephony and Web services – that consume additional bandwidth. Applications that once were restricted to (and indeed, only needed in) a LAN must be extended nationwide and often globally, affecting everything from security policy to disaster recovery to switching fabrics. New applications have arisen that are now “mission-critical.” And a demanding workforce won’t tolerate slow response times.
By consolidating into one or two centers, organizations are upping the bandwidth requirement into the data centers and focusing intently on reliability. “Data-center consolidation will cause us to redesign the network,” says the CTO for a large financial-services company. “We’re going from seven data centers resulting from four acquisitions… all centralizing into one data center. When we do that, it will change a lot of the connections and terminating points.”
The network impact of the next-generation data center falls into two primary categories.
First, more bandwidth. Most companies have at minimum a T-3 circuit coming into HQ. Specifically, 31% of the IT executives who participated in a recent Nemertes Research benchmark say their typical data center feed is a T-3. An additional 35% report feeding their data centers with more bandwidth: 17% say they have multiple T-3s, 11% report OC-3s, and 6% say OC-12 and above. As noted, this will increase dramatically. For most organizations, next-generation data centers and applications mean their data center bandwidth requirements are skyrocketing; many are reporting triple-digit growth.
Second, an increased requirement for reliability. Many IT execs are looking into technologies such as Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) that increase WAN reliability and make it easier to recover from the failure of a single critical site. The big advantage that MPLS provides to the data center is any-to-any connectivity, which makes it easy for remote sites to seamlessly switch to a back-up data center in the case of outage (with frame relay and ATM, backup requires provisioning “shadow” permanent virtual circuits and/or deploying switched virtual circuits – both of which add cost and complexity).
Bottom line: When redesigning your data center, don’t forget the WAN.
