Trevor Dearing, head of enterprise marketing, EMEA at Juniper Networks looks at how to make sure you are up to speed, safely An organization’s decision to adopt virtualisation signals its intention to compete in today’s competitive market using the most advanced technology available. Even a powerful new approach like virtualisation doesn’t perform in a vacuum though. Careful contemplation of bandwidth, latency, security and consistency of your network environment will help users overcome hurdles and delays on the way to virtualisation goals thereby creating a network that supports your virtualisation targets, maintains your quality-of-service and availability commitments, and exceeds the most demanding requirements of your business future.

Security plays a vital role in any virtualised workplace. Workers require access to a range of applications on multiple security systems that already have stringent security policies in place, but in order to provide isolated access, they require security without compromise. Juniper Networks has created a partner ecosystem delivering end-to-end data centre solutions operating on open standards providing customers with flexibility and choice. The solution is to provide networks that are both cost-effective and efficient to deploy.

The concept of virtualisation is nothing new. Maximizing resources by the use of virtual machines on a single platform has always made good sense. For years the economics of personal computing pushed us to a distributed model. The PC was cheap and if we could use all of the desktop resources we could avoid central processing. Unfortunately this ideal was ruined by reality: the concept of so much information being distributed in an uncontrolled manner through an organization became a security nightmare. Equally, the cost of managing the applications and licenses across so many desktops was prohibitive. The development of web technology allowed us to return to a more controlled and centralized model.

Blade technology provides a good first step to solving security in the virtualised workplace by enabling the consolidation of a number of individual servers into a smaller rackspace and less power consumption. This provides many cost benefits as well as controlling the speed with which we need to extend or renew datacentres. Longer term, new virtualisation techniques will provide us with much better utilisation and a reduction of space and power. This can either be implemented on individual severs, blade technology or more likely the new generation of super servers.

Virtualisation delivers the capability to deploy, move, or clone an application from one platform to another over a network, even when it is running. Live migration of applications at this speed and scale demands new levels of performance, reliability, and standardisation from networks. Thoughtful planning of network architectures is the first step toward virtualisation's full value. Fortunately, the requirements of virtualisation are evolutionary – natural extensions of capabilities that networking solution providers have been improving for years. But large-scale virtualisation initiatives should take a close look at their networks early in the planning process, to assure that they offer wire-rate high-density core switching.

At the data centre core, server virtualisation can raise demands on network bandwidth and latency. Wire-rate network performance allows processing of sustained and bursty traffic without dropped packets, avoiding TCP retransmissions that increase application latency. Architecture counts most at the core, and dense wire-rate 10GbE ports can help weed out multiple layers of switching – in all but the largest enterprise networks, it can even eliminate the aggregation layer entirely. Simplification of the core cuts latency, complexity, and cost, and improves reliability: all key elements for a successful virtualisation initiative.

Virtualisation providers have done an excellent job of addressing user concerns about security – most users now see virtual machines as no less secure than the physical machines on which they run. But live migration of virtual machines and the applications they carry creates new network security tradeoffs. Firewalls that protect sensitive network legs or sub-networks may introduce latencies that can cripple a running application on a virtual machine, even though they might be invisible to a physical server. And the risk of failure creates an incentive for removing protection, with obvious risks.

There is simply no substitute for performance. Rather than play a dangerous game trying to balance availability against security to defer hardware purchases, it's time to upgrade critical firewalls, focusing on latency and throughput metrics.
Network operating environment consistency - server administrators rarely think about the operating systems of network infrastructure – but they should learn more. Most data centre networks today run between six to ten different network operating systems, adding complexity, inconsistency, and delay in qualifying new features.
Optimising network performance for virtual environments is difficult enough without the challenge of a different operating system on every switch, router, VPN appliance, firewall, and more. When you standardise on a single operating system (not OS “family”) for network hardware, you’ll get faster project turnaround, better network performance, and more reliable operation of applications running in virtual environments.

Virtualisation is not the only great motive to upgrade performance and reliability of corporate networks. Up-to-date, optimized networks deliver business benefits that not only support the latest technologies, but unlock your organisation’s ability to stay in the race - with networks that deliver basic IT services with utility-grade reliability, to support business users, satisfy regulators, and delight customers. In order to outpace competition businesses need to utilise innovative technologies that improve productivity, cut costs, and craft new services that will redefine business competitive landscape.