Bandwidth, Network Speeds Exploding With Hyperscale Deployments

As applications become more network-centric and the volume of data grows in the cloud, organizations are seeing increased bandwidth demand for front-end applications, mid-tier big data analytics and content distribution, back end transaction processing and storage management, according to an Emulex study of 1,623 U.S. and European IT professionals.
The study found 57 percent of respondents have adopted hyperscale networking environments that require massive scalability in network resources.
The top workloads in which 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) and Office 365 (19 percent).
These were followed by email collaboration (19 percent), customer relationship management (18 percent), disaster recovery (13 percent), e-commerce (9 percent), enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (5 percent) and SAP Hana (2 percent).
Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing for Emulex, ttold eWEEK big data and analytics are driving high volumes of data storage, capture, movement and archiving which all drive an increased need for both higher bandwidth and lower latency on 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet using RDMA.
“The entire storage infrastructure must accelerate from the host to the scale-out storage model, starting with more use of solid state disk (SSD) in the host for apps like SAP Hana, low latency data movement with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) for Hadoop, smart caching in SSD arrays and massive scale-out disk farms for data that never stops growing or goes away,” he explained.
Of those respondents, more than half (51 percent) named increasing bandwidth as a major challenge in moving to hyperscale environments.
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.
In addition, 37 percent of respondents are taking a hybrid approach, using both private and public cloud, while 31 percent are investing in private cloud, but are cautious about moving data to the public cloud and 30 percent are taking a “wait-and-see” approach to storing data in the cloud.
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.
More than half (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.
Fifteen 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.