Cloud Computing and Cloud Services Will Drive the Next Evolution in High Performance Networking
For several decades, service providers have focused their efforts on achieving three primary goals: evolving the network to deliver new services for businesses, consumers, and/or governments; changing the economics of how those services are delivered and used; and improving the end user experience.
The advent of cloud computing and cloud services has the potential to fundamentally reshape how computing resources are designed, implemented, and used worldwide. In simple terms, cloud computing is a new mode of computing in which technology-enabled services are delivered to multiple consumers from multiple providers over a network. The services delivered through the cloud can vary widely, and may include technology services, applications, content, or process services. Vendors themselves define their services in a number of ways, including “software as a service,” “platform as a service,” and “infrastructure as a service.” Revenue is generated through subscription fees, pay-per-use fees, advertising fees, internal chargeback mechanisms, or subsidized delivery.
The cloud computing infrastructure supporting these services encompasses computing, storage, networking, applications, and service elements that are typically housed in a large data center and can be accessed by a variety of mobile and fixed devices. Prior computing systems were essentially dedicated to individual businesses and applications. In contrast, the cloud computing infrastructure must be shared across multiple applications, users, departments, and businesses in order to achieve economies of scale. Sharing may occur in private, public, or hybrid cloud architectures, depending on the target audience, usage, and security requirements.
So What Does This Mean for the Network?
As with traditional hosting infrastructures, the network is the foundation for cloud computing service production and delivery. Its role in service delivery is obvious: the network provides the infrastructure for delivering, accessing, and sharing applications and services through the cloud. The network also has a role to play in service production. Operators use network load balancing, virtual machines, and high-performance computing grids to pool, abstract, and virtualize servers. This, in turn, enables operators to concentrate cloud resources in larger data centers where they can be more efficiently managed. But concentrating resources in larger data centers only works if the global network can deliver applications and services from those data centers to consumers, other data centers, even other clouds. Simply put: without the network, there is no cloud.
Cloud computing is distinct from traditional hosting services in that it must provide multi-tenancy—the ability to simultaneously deliver multiple personalized or partitioned services from a common, shared infrastructure. To do this, the infrastructure must be able to deliver fast access across multiple network protocols to a broad array of fixed and mobile devices, and adapt to real-time demands from businesses and consumers.
To allow the technology—and economics—of cloud computing to work, the network must be:
- Scalable enough to support large customer populations, often in the millions of users, without adding complexity
- Fast enough to support any communications application or service, addressing both bandwidth and latency
- Reliable enough to deliver services despite failures, whether they are natural, accidental, or malicious
- Secure enough to protect itself and the information it carries
- Simple enough take complexity out of the customer environment and automate it within the network itself
Migrating to a cloud computing infrastructure is not something that can be done overnight. Consequently, Juniper has developed a strategy to help customers implement a scalable, secure cloud infrastructure over time.
Service Production: Networking the Data Center
Juniper is working with customers to rethink the traditional data center architectures built over the past 20 years. Our goal is to take the simplicity and low latency of a single switch and scale it reliably and securely across a data center. This single logical switch architecture is a far cry from the structure of most modern data centers, which can contain three or more tiers of equipment.
We begin by helping our customers move from their current architecture to a simpler two-tier model. Reducing the number of elements in the network has a number of immediate benefits—reducing equipment and operations costs, simplifying management, improving network latency and performance consistency, and reducing space, power, and cooling costs.
We then integrate the simplified switching environment with virtualized security services, powerful routing capability to connect across and between clouds, and a “single pane of glass” to manage the network. This enables operators to provide a better user experience at a low total cost of ownership.
In the future, Juniper’s Stratus project will deliver a flat single-tier, non-blocking, converged data center fabric. Stratus offers the inherent simplicity of a single switch, yet can scale across even the largest cloud data center—delivering the economies of scale promised by cloud infrastructure.
Service Delivery: Powering the Global Network
The seamless, continuous delivery of applications and computing resources to end users around the globe demands a high-performance network that provides non-stop scalability, performance, reliability and manageability—and the elasticity to adjust network resources dynamically to traffic volume, priorities, users, and applications. Juniper’s routing portfolio has already proven its ability to reliably connect the world’s largest networks through:
- Network virtualization: Juniper routers feature the most sophisticated network virtualization capabilities in the industry—giving service providers the flexibility, scalability, and manageability they need to implement cloud computing.
- Carrier-class reliability: Technologies such as non-stop forwarding, non-stop routing, In-Service Software Upgrade, rapid virtual path failovers, fast re-route and graceful restarts provide high availability for the foundation of cloud infrastructures.
- Intelligent services: Juniper offers services to identify and uniquely treat traffic based on one or more of a wide variety of contextual criteria, including user and session identity, privilege, application and service requirements, and network and security state.
- Application and user-level awareness: Juniper edge routers and software help define and automate policies that govern user authentication, security, bandwidth usage, priority settings, transactional needs, and service level agreements to ensure quality of experience.
Service Security: Securing the Cloud
Juniper also offers a robust portfolio of security solutions that can help secure data flows within and between clouds, as well as directly to users. The solutions provide a distributed suite of protections operating at key points of vulnerability and at layers where network-based security adds to the quality and integrity of the services being delivered.
Within each data center, we complement the traffic partitioning supplied by VPNs and VLANs in the network with corresponding security policies and enforcement mechanisms in the world’s fastest firewall and intrusion detection platform, Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways.
Between data centers and throughout the network infrastructure, high-performance protection is deployed at the gateways to multiple internal data centers of the cloud infrastructure—securing anywhere from two to dozens of sites linked together in a distributed resource pool.
At user access points to cloud services, we apply central definition and distributed enforcement of cloud security policies. Users and cloud providers alike benefit from a unified configuration management system enabling a diverse range of authentication, access permission, and integration into the forwarding infrastructures designed for carrying the cloud’s multiple services.
Read the entire article at: Juniper’s website at http://www.juniper.net/cloud
June 23, 2010