Virtualizing Data Center WAN Connectivity

It’s interesting to watch the evolution of data centers. What were once primarily static, backup and storage sites are now dynamic powerhouses that are creating distinct competitive advantages for enterprises and significant differentiation opportunities for data center providers.

As more organizations begin to virtualize servers and run core, high-bandwidth business applications remotely via the cloud, network connectivity is becoming a critical component within the data center. High-performance networks that ensure characteristics like speed, availability, reliability, low latency and capacity on demand increasingly are tied directly to the success of a company’s business. Health care organizations are relying on high-performance data center connectivity for optimized patient care applications, such as Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and Picture Archiving and Communications Systems (PACS). And for many financial services institutions and stock exchanges, the data center has become the new virtual trading floor, where a difference of one millisecond can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The market opportunity for high-performance data center connectivity hasn’t gone unnoticed by data center providers either – just look at NYSE Euronext’s recent news that it has already sold more than 20,000 square feet of colocation space in its new 100 Gigabit-connected New Jersey data center to financial firms seeking high-speed access for electronic trading.

But for large enterprises, which typically have multiple data centers in geographically dispersed locations, traditional approaches to connectivity tend to be highly inefficient. In today’s environment, it is not uncommon for an enterprise’s data center WAN connectivity to leverage separate technologies depending on geography, application performance requirements and the necessary capacity. This approach requires different equipment and transport services – such as Carrier Ethernet, IP/MPLS, OTN/WDM or SONET/SDH – required to carry network traffic, making them rigid, costly and complex to manage.

Across the industry and our customer base at Ciena, I’m beginning to see many customers realizing the value in not just the virtualized data center, but also its WAN connectivity. Virtualized data center WAN connectivity allows the federation of multiple physical networks and/or connections into a single “Virtualized Optical WAN.” These high-performance and converged networks seamlessly carry traffic using any transport service between numerous destinations – whether a few city blocks away or halfway around the world.

This approach not only reduces costs but also increases performance by optimizing bandwidth assignments matched to specific data-center applications. Also, with the use of service-oriented provisioning, the network is driven directly from the users and applications creating a flexible and dynamic bandwidth and connectivity resource pool. And in these dynamic environments where traffic can spike quickly, the ability to flexibly increase bandwidth or provision new services in a matter of minutes or hours versus days or weeks is critical.

The role of the data center to make businesses more profitable and efficient will only continue to grow, and as it does, new approaches to connectivity – like the virtualized optical WAN – will be essential to maximizing the opportunity and creating differentiation advantages for both enterprises and providers.

Dave Parks is director of product marketing at Ciena Corp. (CIEN), which provides flexible platforms, intelligent software and professional services to help service providers and enterprises worldwide use their networks to change the way they compete. He is also the marketing committee chairman for the IP/MPLS Forum. Before joining Ciena, Parks was a senior analyst with the Yankee Group covering enterprise Ethernet and IP VPN network services and market trends. Prior to that, he supported product management and marketing for Lucent Technologies and Ascend/Cascade Communications.