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    Bandwidth and Network Speeds Exploding with Hyperscale Deployments

    We have data, lots of it. We want access to that data anytime, from any device. We want to access that data now, not 20 minutes from now. This always-on, high-data volume demand has significantly increased the strain on network bandwidth.

    A recent study conducted by Emulex Corporation, a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, found 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. Organizations have responded by increasing their network bandwidth, and more than 77 percent 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).

    “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.”

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    Are You Ready for Hyperscale?

    Click through for results from a study on how hyperscale deployments are affecting network bandwidth, conducted by Emulex Corporation.

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    Hyperscale and the Cloud

    • 37 percent of respondents are taking a hybrid approach, using both private and public cloud.
    • 31 percent are investing in private cloud, but are cautious about moving data to the public cloud.
    • 30 percent are taking a “wait and see” approach to storing data in the cloud.

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    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 percent), application testing/development (23 percent), Big Data/analytics (19 percent), Office 365 (19 percent), email collaboration (19 percent), customer relationship management (CRM) (18 percent), disaster recovery (13 percent), e-commerce (9 percent), ERP systems (5 percent) and SAP Hana (2 percent).

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    Investing in Open Networking Approaches

    • 55 percent of respondents from hyperscale organizations have already deployed an open compute-based infrastructure, and 43 percent plan to in the next 24 months. In contrast, only 17 percent of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations have deployed an open compute-based infrastructure, and only 17 percent plan to in the next 24 months.
    • 31 percent of respondents have already deployed an NFV-based infrastructure, and 68 percent plan to in the next 24 months. In contrast, only 16 percent of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations have deployed a network functions virtualization (NFV)-based infrastructure, and only 16 percent plan to in the next 24 months.
    • 15 percent of respondents have already deployed OpenStack, and 82 percent plan to deploy OpenStack in the next 24 months. In comparison, only 11 percent of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations have deployed OpenStack, and only 20 percent plan to in the next 24 months.
    • 11 percent of respondents have already deployed software-defined networking (SDN), and 86 percent plan to implement SDN in the next 24 months. Comparatively, only 17 percent of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations have deployed SDN, and only 29 percent plan to in the next 24 months.

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

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    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 percent), latency (36 percent), and security concerns (20 percent) as the top three challenges in migrating these workloads to the cloud.
    • For non-hyperscale companies, respondents reported security (70 percent), latency (44 percent), and increased bandwidth requirements (39 percent) as the top three challenges in migrating workloads to the cloud.

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    Moving to Cloud Requires Network Upgrades

    Ninety-seven percent 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 percent of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations.

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    Hyperscale Companies Need Network Speed

    • 38 percent 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 percent of respondents from non-hyperscale companies.
    • 93 percent of survey respondents at hyperscale companies expect to be at 40Gbps or faster in three years, but only 44 percent of non-hyperscale organizations expect to be at 40Gbps or faster in the same timeframe.

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