Bandwidth and network speeds exploding with Hyperscale deployments

As applications become more network-centric, and the volume of data grows in the cloud, organisations are seeing increased bandwidth demand for front-end applications driven by mobility and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), mid-tier big data analytics and content distribution, back-end transaction processing and storage management. The survey results below indicate that hyperscale and multi-tenant requirements are driving demand for higher network bandwidth to manage vast volumes of data, lower latency to accelerate application delivery and performance, and increased security to meet service level agreements (SLAs), and regulatory and compliance requirements. Organisations have responded by increasing their network bandwidth, and more than 77% of respondents running hyperscale environments say the move to the cloud has already necessitated the upgrade of their networks to at least 40Gb Ethernet (40GbE).

Other key findings from the survey include:
Hyperscale and the cloud
· 37% of respondents are taking a hybrid approach, using both private and public cloud.
· 31% are investing in private cloud, but are cautious about moving data to the public cloud.
· 30% are taking a “wait and see” approach to storing data in the cloud.

The top workloads most frequently migrated to the cloud
· The top workloads respondents reported they have moved, or plan to move to the cloud, include customer business applications (29%), application testing/development (23%), big data/analytics (19%), Office 365 (19%), email collaboration (19%), customer relationship management (CRM) (18%), disaster recovery (13%), ecommerce (9%), ERP systems (5%) and SAP Hana (2%).

Hyperscale organisations are investing in open networking approaches
· 55% of respondents from hyperscale organisations have already deployed an Open Compute-based infrastructure, and 43% plan to in the next 24 months. In contrast, only 17% of respondents from non-hyperscale organisations have deployed an Open Compute-based infrastructure, and only 17% plan to in the next 24 months.
· 31% of respondents have already deployed an NFV-based infrastructure, and 68% plan to in the next 24 months. In contrast, only 16% of respondents from non-hyperscale organisations have deployed a network functions virtualisation (NFV)-based infrastructure, and only 16% plan to in the next 24 months.
· 15% of respondents have already deployed OpenStack, and 82% plan to deploy OpenStack in the next 24 months. In comparison, only 11% of respondents from non-hyperscale organisations have deployed OpenStack, and only 20% plan to in the next 24 months.
· 11% of respondents have already deployed software-defined networking (SDN), and 86% plan to implement SDN in the next 24 months. Comparatively, only 17% of respondents from non-hyperscale organisations have deployed SDN, and only 29% plan to in the next 24 months.

State of data center networking technologies and protocols
· All survey respondents reported they are using a mix of network technologies in their private data centers. 23% have deployed 10GbE, 7% have deployed 40GbE, and 3.5% have deployed 100GbE.
· In the next 12-24 months, 68% of all survey respondents plan to deploy 10GbE, 63% plan to deploy 25GbE, 69% plan to deploy 40GbE and 70% plan to deploy 100GbE.
· All survey respondents reported they are using a mix of networking protocols in their private data centers. 23% have deployed Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), 18% have deployed iSCSI and 2% have deployed RDMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE).
· In the next 12-24 months, 54% of respondents plan to deploy FCoE, 65% expect to be using iSCSI and 68% expect to be using RoCE.

Bandwidth remains a major challenge
· Bandwidth remains a major challenge for hyperscale companies, versus non-hyperscale companies that are focused on security. For hyperscale companies, respondents reported increased bandwidth requirements (51%), latency (36%), and security concerns (20%) as the top three challenges in migrating these workloads to the cloud.
· For non-hyperscale companies, respondents reported security (70%), latency (44%), and increased bandwidth requirements (39%) as the top three challenges in migrating workloads to the cloud.

Hyperscale organisations are upgrading networking technologies at a much higher rate
· 97% of respondents reported that adoption of hyperscale has necessitated a move to 10GbE, 40GbE or higher speeds to meet demands of high-performance applications such as big data, analytics and content distribution, compared to only 48% of respondents from non-hyperscale organisations.

Hyperscale companies need network speed

38% of respondents from hyperscale companies said they have 40Gb per second (Gbps) or faster network connections to their primary data center, compared to only 22% of respondents from non-hyperscale companies.
93% of survey respondents at hyperscale companies expect to be at 40Gbps or faster in three years, but only 44% of non-hyperscale organisations expect to be at 40Gbps or faster in the same timeframe.

“The move to hyperscale is entering a second phase from the cloud providers to managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprises. This survey highlights that like every major transition in IT infrastructure, changes are required and IT professionals have to re-think almost everything they have done in the past,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing, Emulex. “Beyond the concept of hyperscale models, we see very specific technologies being implemented such as OpenStack, SDN and NFV. Each of these changes has performance, operational expenditure (OPEX) and team skill implications for application, networking and storage infrastructure. We are working with leading end users, ecosystem partners and OEMs to bring the right connectivity, monitoring and management tools to make these solutions viable and operational.”