CIOIN

Interview with John McHugh, VP and Chief Marketing Officer for Brocade on network transformation and key trends in DC strategy to enable virtualization, cloud and convergence. 

CIO: In one of the Forrester’s reports, “The Data Center Network Evolution: Five Reasons This Isn't Your Dad's Network”, the author Andre Kindness states that modernization of datacenters requires transformation of today’s bloated and static network into a dynamic, efficient, automated and high-throughput entity. How close or far are the enterprises from reality in this regard?

John McHugh:  Enterprises are still taking the first step, of what most people refer to as ‘the journey to the cloud’.  Customers are still testing the water around virtualization that, most agree, is the starting point of this journey. Once your environment is virtualized taking advantage of the cloud becomes pretty straightforward.  

While application virtualization seems to have taken off in a big way, I feel, information is more challenging to virtualize and to deal with in a distributed manner. Information is much bigger since a lot of tight personal information is contained in it. It is difficult when information and application get too far apart, so cloud enablement of information is going to be equally challenging.

CIO: A lot of Indian enterprises have already begun their journey to the cloud with virtualization initiatives, what are the next set of challenges ahead of them?

JM: CIOs are realizing that as they virtualize their application, they now have a level of complexity and an associated cost of manageability which they never saw coming. Virtualization is great in its ability to enables cloud business models, but the problem is it demands a level of management and resource control, which the traditional network and network management tools is unable to deal with.

Customers are looking to transform the infrastructure that connects their data centers together because the existing infrastructure is not suited for the new environment that virtualization has created.

CIO: If the entire network is metamorphosing into a datacenter, technically who owns the information: application platform, compute infrastructure or the network?

JM:  The wonderful thing about the cloud is that data and information will be distributed according to whatever works for that specific biz model. We are seeing a trend in outsourcing today. CIOs now have an opportunity to change the way they do business. The CIOs still own the IT strategy of the company but they now have options and economic models that never existed before. However, the traditional CIO problems still persist - how to be cost effective, build a reliable network and secure your critical assets of the company.

CIO: Traditional architecture versus Brocade’s dynamic architecture- what has changed?

JM: The traditional data centre was a physically confined space. It was a really unique spot within the network and building a reliable and highly connected network was pretty straightforward.

Now in the cloud, those application and information that was residing with in your enterprise can reside anywhere at any data centre, around the world or distributed information sources.

Now the cloud enabled challenge is that you now have an end-to-end network that has all the capabilities that of a traditional data center had. 

The biggest question facing the industry in the next 5-10 years is  - how do you design an end to end network that is resilient, with higher reliability that is easy to manage and is highly connected.

CIO: What does this encompass- building an end – to - end network infrastructure in cloud- like environments?

JM: The traditional Ethernet architectures don’t work in the current environments because it creates many boundaries. They were great when you were trying to bring together a global network efficiently, but they don’t have the characteristics of being non-stop or with low latency and high connectivity.

Ethernet by its basic design works on the spamming 3 (STP) protocol.  What STP does is anytime it sees two connections going between the same devices it will shut one of them down because it does not like redundant patterns. Unfortunately this goes against the new world we’re moving towards. To build for scalability, we need lots of parallel paths such that if one of them fails, the others just take up to ensure unhindered transmission.

Therefore we have discovered the world will move form traditional Ethernet based architecture to fabric based dynamic architectures.

In the fabric architecture, is like a woven fabric, there are lots of connections between points and when it moves to a specific point, traffic just smoothly flows around that gets to the destination reliably in high performance manner. One of the biggest breakthroughs the Ethernet fabric will be the definition of how you make the cloud work.

CIO:  How the Brocade One Strategy can help organizations build future-proof network infrastructures that are ready for tomorrow while protecting their current tech investments today? 

JM: Enterprise customers and service providers now have to partner together to build this cloud oriented world that characterized by four things - unmatched simplicity, investment protection, non stop networking, and application optimization. From a financial standpoint this means reducing capex and opex, allowing for business continuity in a open multi vendor environment.

The task at hand it to build a network that is easy to play, protects earlier investment, in an open multi vendor environment with distributed data centre that can support both your legacy and new applications.

CIO: Lessons from Japan?

JM: What happened in Japan is a great illustration of the importance of fabric infrastructures- the advantage of fabric is that you can punch a hole in it a still maintain the basic integrity end-to-end.

 There are two sides to the Japanese situation. They suffered a tremendous damage to their infrastructure but many of them continued to operate without breakdown and I think – everything that continued to operate and function throughout the terrible incident was based on natural fabric architecture.

It struggled at places where you have single point traditional support architecture that got inundate or knocked out.