The technologies pioneered by the world’s largest Internet companies to create so-called hyperscale environments that can cost-effectively keep up with the data explosion are trickling down into the traditional enterprise as the increasingly intertwined open-source and vendor communities work to lower barriers to entry.

Emulex is right in the thick of things. Mike Jochimsen, the company’s director of product marketing, appeared in a recent episode of SiliconANGLE’s CubeConversations series to share his insight into how that disruption is redefining the corporate network and outline his firm’s role in the transformation. This particular episode is a follow-up discussion to host Stu Miniman’s previous Wikibon report, where the analyst looks at networking in hyperscale environments.

Applying web-scale lessons in the enterprise

One of the more distinct characteristics of hyperscale environments is that they are made up entirely of low-cost commodity components stripped down to the bare bone for maximum scalability and replaceability.  There is a very practical reason behind that, according to Jochimsen.

“This build-your-own [phenomenon] stems from the fact that these guys have probably one or two key applications driving their networking needs, so therefore they can design their infrastructure to support very specific workloads and traffic patterns,” he explains.  That contrasts with the situation in traditional enterprises, which often times have hundreds if not thousands of applications to manage.

As a result of that tremendous sprawl and all the legacy baggage that goes with it, a substantial portion of technology budgets is spent on maintenance, which Jochimsen notes makes it considerably harder for large organizations to keep up with the pace of change. That need to maintain legacy investments stretches IT organizations so thin that they opt to continue purchasing proprietary servers with support attached just to avoid adding more complexity to their environments,  he says.

That mindset carries over to the network side, where enterprise architectures are built to avoid outages as opposed to mitigating failures to the point of near-nullification, as is the case with hyperscale designs. The latter approach provides far greater reliability that is achieved through the same use of commodity components, which enables increased scalability in other parts of the data center, Jochimsen notes.  He adds that the modularity afforded by this model has the added benefit of making it easier to implement new technologies like software-defined networking, or SDN for short.

“SDN is a concept, and within that concept there are a lot of practical components that can be implemented,” Jochimsen  details. “You see in the infrastructure this extrapolation of the control layer from the data layer and in between that you got a layer of APIs that will manage traffic and up on top of it you got additional services.” Different companies are tackling different layers of the software-defined stack, he continues, which contributes to ecosystem complexity and confusion over the exact definition of SDN.

Historically, it would take the industry several years to establish a standard for a new technology, but Jochimsen predicts that SDN will evolve much more rapidly thanks to the velocity of the open-source movement and the OpenStack project especially. The Neutron networking-as-a-service  component of the popular cloud platform in particular has garnered a lot of support from vendors, including Emulex.  The company is an  active participant in the initiative and has added comprehensive integration with its products, Jochimsen says.

Enabling change across the entire network

Emulex focuses mainly on storage networking, but its contributions to the open source community serve to prove that it has much broader plans for the enterprise, according to Jochimsen. He points out that his company is the second largest vendor of  10-gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) adapters, the proliferation  of which he credits as a driver behind the growing emphasis on bringing networking up to speed with advances in compute and storage.

“With the advent of 10GbE and the convergence of more technologies on top of 10GbE there seems to be a lot more concern about the ability of the network to scale and meet the needs of even more workloads on top of it.” Jochimsen says.

The challenge is hardly new for CIOs. It originates from the world of high-performance computing, where an answer emerged in the form of clustering, a method wherein workloads are distributed across multiple compute nodes for faster processing. The same concept is now being applied in the enterprise with scale-out networking, which Jochimsen  highlights holds the promise of enabling applications to make more efficient use of hardware resources than before.

In parallel with traditional IT organizations embracing more robust architectures, the telecommunications space is seeing rising interest in network function virtualization, a concept aimed at decoupling service delivery from the underlying infrastructure that runs complementary to SDN. The explosion of data from the connected universe is driving widening adoption of the technology, a trend that is in turn causing carriers to abandon the traditional monolithic appliances they have used in the past in favor of smaller and more agile modules designed from the ground up with virtualization in mind.

Emulex is collaborating with the telco community to develop solutions that meet those criteria, Jochimsen highlights, an effort that ties with its broader push to expand beyond storage networking to new markets like the emerging hyperscale space and enterprise security, a field where it has been active since acquiring Endace last April.

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