This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
This Website Uses Cookies
By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to our cookie policy. Learn More
This website requires certain cookies to work and uses other cookies to help you have the best experience. By visiting this website, certain cookies have already been set, which you may delete and block. By closing this message or continuing to use our site, you agree to the use of cookies. Visit our updated privacy and cookie policy to learn more.
Subscribe
  • Sign In
  • Create Account
  • Sign Out
  • My Account
  • Home
  • Products
    • New Products
    • Product Submission Form
  • News
  • Topics
    • Cloud Strategy
    • Cooling
    • Energy
    • Facility Design
    • Heard on the Internet
    • Infrastructure
    • Management
    • Power
    • The Optimal Edge
    • IT-Colo Strategic Planner
  • Columns
    • Case Studies
    • Critical Thoughts
    • Guest Column
    • Hot Aisle Insight
    • On Target Series
    • On the Road
    • Security Perspectives
    • Sustainable Operations
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Zinc Whiskers
  • Blog
    • Data Center Spotlight
    • The Mission Critical Blog
    • Cloud Strategy Blog
    • Guest Bloggers
    • About the Bloggers
    • MC Blog Submission
  • Education
    • Quizzes
    • Data Center Design Information
    • Continuing Education
    • DCEP Training
    • DC Professional
    • Technical Advisory Board
  • Multimedia
    • Videos
    • Photo Galleries
    • eNewsletter
    • Webinars
    • Mobile App
    • White Paper eBlast
    • Interactive Spotlight
    • Video Spotlights
  • Resources
    • Facility Manager of the Year
    • Industry Events
    • White Papers
    • Classifieds
    • Store
    • Partners
    • Market Research
    • Custom Content & Marketing Services
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Digital Editions
    • Ad Index
    • Subscribe
  • Directory
    • Buyers Guide
    • Take a Tour
  • Contact
    • Contact Us
    • Advertise
Home » Blogs » The Mission Critical Blog » Unifying Your Multisite Data Center With A Data Center Interconnect Fabric
190102-capuano-author-photo-mike-capuano

Mike Capuano is chief marketing officer of Pluribus Networks. He has over 20 years of marketing, product management, and business development experience in the networking industry. Prior to joining Pluribus, Mike was VP of Global Marketing at Infinera, where he built a world class marketing team and helped drive revenue from $400M to over $800M. Prior to Infinera, Mike led product marketing across Cisco’s $6B service provider routing, switching, and optical portfolio and launched iconic products such as the CRS and ASR routers. He has also held senior positions at Juniper Networks, Pacific Broadband, and Motorola.

From The Blog / Guest Bloggers from the Industry

Unifying Your Multisite Data Center With A Data Center Interconnect Fabric

The time is now to unify your data center infrastructure.

MC-FromTheBlog-900x550.jpg
February 4, 2019
Mike Capuano
No Comments
KEYWORDS colocation services / data center / public cloud
Reprints

Life as a modern IT leader is filled with challenges, shifting priorities, and endless compromises. The North Star, in most cases, is to be an enabler of, not an impediment to, digital transformation. Of course, that is much easier said than done. At the same time, getting it right has never been more important especially when it comes to foundational infrastructure like the data center. In fact, according to IDC, Worldwide Datacenter 2019 Predictions, “A major threat to successful transformation for most businesses remains the failure of their IT organizations to convert from being the back-office enabler of internal business processes to playing a leading role as the engine powering digital business flows between people, things, and data.”

As many workloads move to the public cloud, others remain on premise at primary and backup data center locations due to concerns for cost, control, refactoring complexity, and data sovereignty. Many enterprises (and regional cloud/colocation providers) have at least two data center locations and with the rise of edge compute mini-data centers, more are likely to sprout up in locations such as the factory floor, oil rigs, central offices, or 5G base station colocation facilities.

This means that IT leaders, especially those in charge of the network, face an increasing number of potential challenges. While they want to be an enabler of digital transformation, their infrastructure is becoming more distributed and complex, increasing the chance of outages and making provisioning, management, and troubleshooting more time-consuming.

The promise of data center interconnect fabric

From a network perspective, data center interconnect (DCI) technology is used today to connect two or more geographically distributed data center locations. Traditionally, routers sit at the outside edge of the data center (DC Gateways) and use Layer 3 Internet Protocol (IP) connectivity over point-to-point dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) transponders to route and transport traff­ic between geographically distributed data centers. This basic transport is required, but as edge compute starts to emerge and data centers become more distributed, it is not sufficient.

What is needed going forward is a data center interconnection fabric (DCIF) that can stretch across multiple sites, not just to the edge of the data center, but actually reach inside the data center down to every top of rack switch (leaf). The fabric should have the following attributes:

  • The fabric makes N switches look like one logical switch through software-defined network (SDN) control
  • Control of the entire fabric from any switch via CLI or through a standard API like REST

Configuration changes are populated to all switches to simplify operations, homogenize configurations, and reduce human error. If a switch cannot accept the change, an alert should be raised and no switches should accept the change until this is resolved.

The SDN control and state is “in the network” running inside the switches themselves to avoid the cost, latency penalty, and reconvergence risk of a remotely located controller keeping state. Additionally, a controllerless solution avoids the reliability risk using the out-of-band (OOB) management channel and corresponding single OOB port on the switch.

Pervasive telemetry must be throughout the fabric down to the flow level so problems anywhere in the fabric can be quickly identified rather than a time-consuming switch-by-switch investigation.

This functionality should be available on open networking switches so white box economics can be achieved as many switches need to be deployed in many locations.

This approach goes beyond simple point-to-point connectivity to enable seamless unification of multiple data centers. It supports high-performance and scale-out architectures that allow multiple data centers to work together more eff­iciently — dramatically simplifying operations, reducing the potential for human error, and increasing resiliency and security.

Next generation DCIF has tangible benefits for enterprises on their digital transformation journey including:

Disaster recovery: Most data center owners have a redundancy strategy and at least two data center locations for disaster recovery. Data center fabrics can make this failover across two or more sites simpler by leveraging technologies like distributed routing with anycast gateway functionality.

Streamlined data center migration/consolidation: For workloads that are still on premise, a high capacity DCI fabric can dramatically streamline the movement of workload from a current data center location to a new one.

Simplify operations: The opportunity here is to make 40 switches look like one switch, with all 40 being controlled from any switch via CLI or from any switch via a REST API with full CLI parity. Well implemented data center fabrics with next-generation software defined networking offer this promise.

Preparing for edge compute: With the proliferation of IoT and new applications that require ultra-low latency, data centers are going to need to become even more distributed. Organizations are now beginning to deploy smaller edge compute data centers — either on-premise or with a colocation provider. DCIF can help to simplify this implementation.

The time is now to unify your data center infrastructure. Modern DCIF provides innumerable benefits and puts companies in a position to deliver elastic, scalable, and high performance digital experiences to employees, customers, and partners. If any of these issues are impacting a company’s data centers or business, now is the time to consider a unification strategy.

 

Blog Topics

Julius Neudorfer

Kong Yang

Michael Siteman

Dr. Tim Oergel

Carrie Higbie

Todd Kiehn

Recent Comments

Modular construction discussion is very important for professional...

Good summary with a couple of questions: At...

I don't feel that "Classic Risk" is the...

Now that makes a lot of sense, and...

Cost Savings versus Risks of Shorter UPS Runtimes

Blog Roll

Data Center Links

Carlini's Comments

Data Center Design

Data Center Dialog

Data Center Networks

Dean Nelson, Sun

Eye on Blades

GigaOm

Green Data Center Blog

Grove's Green IT

IT BusinessEdge

Loosebolts

Data Center Power Blog

DatacenterPro

The Software Advice Blog

SilverBack

190102-capuano-author-photo-mike-capuano

Mike Capuano is chief marketing officer of Pluribus Networks. He has over 20 years of marketing, product management, and business development experience in the networking industry. Prior to joining Pluribus, Mike was VP of Global Marketing at Infinera, where he built a world class marketing team and helped drive revenue from $400M to over $800M. Prior to Infinera, Mike led product marketing across Cisco’s $6B service provider routing, switching, and optical portfolio and launched iconic products such as the CRS and ASR routers. He has also held senior positions at Juniper Networks, Pacific Broadband, and Motorola.

You must login or register in order to post a comment.

Report Abusive Comment

Subscribe For Free!
  • Print & Digital Edition Subscriptions
  • eNewsletter
  • Online Registration
  • Mobile App
  • Subscription Customer Service

More Videos

MC Eaton October Webinar Ads


MC Optimal Edge

Events

August 8, 2018

The Impact of Emerging Energy Storage Technologies for Data Centers

On Demand This webinar will present the mechanical and electrical options for on-site energy storage for your mission critical environment. These options include grid-level battery storage, thermal energy storage, zero-net energy, solar, and critical power stored energy.

September 25, 2018

Powering Edge Data Centers

On Demand An edge data facility is still a data center. One still and must consider design, construction, and operational habits that result in high levels of system availability, maintainability, and resiliency. The disaggregation that edge poses will distribute compute and storage assets, and the challenge will be placing edge assets into sufficiently robust facilities or enclosures outside of traditional data centers where those local solutions can equally sustain those IT operations and systems.

View All Submit An Event

Poll

How close are you to migrating to the cloud?

View Results Poll Archive

Products

Maintaining Mission Critical Systems in a 24/7 Environment, 2nd Edition

Maintaining Mission Critical Systems in a 24/7 Environment, 2nd Edition

This book offers relevant insight into the Mission Critical Environment with an emphasis on business resiliency, data center efficiency, and green power technology.

See More Products

How-To Directory Videos


Mission Critical Product Submission form

Mission Critical Magazine

MC-Cover JanFeb 2019-digital

2019 January/February

Mission Critical Magazine’s 2019 January/February issue takes a deep dive into mission critical facility design as well as the challenges of managing capacity, and another installment of our panel discussion on the state of the data center industry with three industry thought leaders.

View More Subscribe
  • Resources
    • List Rental
    • Security Group
    • Advertiser Index
    • Product Info (Free)
    • Editorial Guidelines
    • Privacy Policy
    • Survey And Sample
  • Want More
    • Connect

Copyright ©2019. All Rights Reserved BNP Media.

Design, CMS, Hosting & Web Development :: ePublishing