How To Manage A Network Infrastructure

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1 POINT OF VIEW NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE ELASTICITY Masahisa Kawashima, VP Product Management ABSTRACT In today s business world, technology is quickly becoming one of the most important factors in a company s chance of success, or remaining a market leader for any length of time. Businesses are in a race to be the fastest to market, the fastest to ship, and the most nimble purveyors of public whims and taste. Technology is the engine that is driving this race, and at this pace, every business risks running itself into a technological wall. Companies often see market shifts coming, but find it impossible to respond fast enough because the IT infrastructure won t allow a quick response. Meanwhile, IT engineers find their hands tied by their workloads. They often don t have the time to develop or deploy new services or business processes that meet the increasing demands of the business. To make matters worse, there simply aren t enough qualified IT employees who have the required skills to work with new, complex networking and data center equipment and software. Businesses can solve part of this problem by embracing a cloud-computing platform that provides automated services, and an abstracted view of operations that hides the complexities of hardware and software configuration. While many organizations are making use of cloud computing products, these solutions leave a gap at the edge of the network. Many devices at the network s edge, such as security appliances and application delivery controllers (ADC), are not yet integrated with cloud computing products, and therefore, must be operated with intensive manual processes and complex configuration rules. NTTi 3 is currently developing an Elastic Service Infrastructure Platform (ESIP) to improve business infrastructure operation. By extending the automation and abstraction technologies of cloud computing to the operation of networking devices, it will be possible for IT operators to manage multiple data centers in disparate locations remotely and quickly, with reduced workload and staff. 1

2 INTRODUCTION Today s business environment dictates that every industry, and every company, regardless of what they manufacture or sell, is a technology company. Business success depends not only on the quality of the company s product but on the quality of the differentiated services and experiences the company delivers. The more technology-enabled services and experiences become prevalent, the more companies and consumers expect. As a result, companies demand an iterative fail-and-learn application development process at a break-neck pace. THREE CHALLENGES TO EFFICIENT ENTERPRISE IT It is becoming increasingly apparent that in order to support application development with fail-and-learn processes for technology-enabled services, IT managers must address three critical challenges: Speed gap between servers and network devices While virtual servers can be instantly deployed on demand with sophisticated software, network devices must be configured at human speed with complex and manual procedures. In addition, as many networking devices are shared by multiple application systems, re-configuring a network device for a new application requires meticulous work to avoid interference with existing applications. This expands the gap in the speed of operation between servers and network devices. Proliferation of network devices Secondly, the evolution of new technologies brings new requirements on IT infrastructure. For example, the evolution of high-speed mobile networks and the prevalence of smartphones have brought new demands such as device-based content optimization and policy enforcement. As the IT industry is aggressively inventing new network devices to address the demand, IT workers are required to continuously learn new skills and protocols. However, technology is changing so rapidly that devices often become obsolete before being fully mastered and leveraged. Spiraling infrastructure operation costs According to a technical publication from University of California at Berkeley, even small networks require a team of up to 25 people, which is a costly proposition. Many network-purchasing decisions are now based on whether the IT staff has enough expertise to use it. 1 To bridge the gap, IT departments have traditionally hired more people, but this inflates the cost of IT operation. This approach is no longer sustainable, 1 Justine Sherry and Sylvia Ratnasamy: A Survey of Enterprise Middlebox Deployments February 9,

3 as companies shift their spending from infrastructure operation to application development to be competitive in the IT-enabled services race. THREE TRENDS MAKING THE CHALLENGES EVEN HARDER Worse, the following three trends are making infrastructure more complex and the challenges even harder: Infrastructure is becoming more distributed Before cloud technology was available, business networks were primarily concerned with internal traffic between offices and data centers. Today, business must consider using pubic services, such as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, to complement their private infrastructure. In addition, a mobile and outsourced workforce must be accommodated. This requires IT operators to mange many locations, including public sites and distributed small workplaces. Workloads are becoming more volatile and unpredictable IT-enabled services often involve running consumer-facing websites and supporting business and consumer mobile devices. Traffic from consumers is naturally more volatile than intra-corporate traffic, and unpredictable in some cases. Maintaining IT infrastructure to meet performance expectations is becoming more difficult, creating additional burden on operators. Security threats are increasing Today, cyber attacks are fueled by economic incentives. Attackers can easily monetize stolen data and hijacked infrastructure. Highly motivated attackers are continuously developing new attack techniques leveraging the latest technologies. As the result, security risks are increasing rapidly. Under these circumstances, it is impossible for IT to meet speed and cost expectations. Yet, businesses are requiring agile and lean IT operations that support the application development of their IT-enabled services. Without solving this critical issue, companies will not survive. This leads to the conclusion that the traditional IT model is simply inadequate for the challenge at hand, and it is time for a dramatic change. 3

4 A NEW MODEL TO KEEP IT NIMBLE AND MORE VALUABLE Ideally, new technologies should enable IT operators to configure infrastructure faster, and more cost effectively, thus shifting IT engineers from infrastructure operation to application development. To achieve this, today s infrastructure that is rooted in the physical and manually intensive world must transition to a new infrastructure model that is powered by software automation. ELASTIC SERVICE INFRASTRUCTURE PLATFORM NTT i 3 is developing an Elastic Service Infrastructure Platform (ESIP) that will allow IT operators to deliver infrastructure resources for applications faster with reduced workload. We rely on three fundamental concepts to build ESIP: Transform physical network devices into virtual instances The scale of the X86 economy has dramatically reduced the cost of the X86-based high-speed computing platform. This has created an opportunity for networking device manufacturers to create virtualized, e.g. software, versions of their products, which run on X86-based generic computing platforms. This trend, Network Function Virtualization (NFV), will reduce the configuration and management speed gap between servers and network devices. Unlike traditional physical devices, virtualized networking functions can be deployed and configured at software speed. The nature of software will enable the deployment of per-application granular instances instead of deploying one big multitenant instance. This will alleviate today s complexity stemming from multi-tenancy configuration. Another benefit of virtualization is the ability to deploy multiple, granular instances in distributed locations, instead of deploying a single device in a datacenter. This will allow performance and security functions to be performed at distributed locations instead of inefficiently aggregating traffic to the data center. Create a single location to manage distributed infrastructure Cloud computing has brought a sophisticated paradigm of IT infrastructure management, where IT operators manage different types of IT resources coherently with a software tool called an orchestrator. ESIP leverages orchestration technologies that will enable IT operators to collectively operate IT resources, including computing and network, distributed in multiple locations from a single point. This will decrease the workload in managing a multitude of network resources in today s distributed infrastructure. 4

5 Use APIs to make operations programmable Another benefit of orchestrator-based infrastructure management is that it makes infrastructure operations programmable. With the use of an orchestrator API, new tools can continuously be developed to assist IT operators. Tools may hide the complexities of underlying IT resources and automate configuration procedures with simplified menus, enabling novice IT operators to quickly respond to infrastructure demands. Other tools may collect metrics from distributed infrastructure elements and visualize performance bottlenecks and security anomalies, enabling IT operators to take appropriate actions responsively. As a result, business will be able to significantly reduce IT workload, using simplified and automated commands. CONCLUSION The NTTi 3 Elastic Service Infrastructure Platform will transform the way businesses operate their IT infrastructure. In addition to improvements in resource management, IT operations will at last function more fully at computer-speed, rather than at human speed. With the advent of intelligent orchestrators managing software-based network and data center elements on a large scale, IT engineers, and the companies that employ them, will find their true value as creators of a new business world one that works faster, more efficiently, more cost effectively, and more competitively than ever before. Best of all, applying automation to routine network processes brings IT staff back to the roots of discovery and invention all to the good of the business and the customers it serves. 5

6 WHO WE ARE NTT Innovation Institute, Inc., (NTTi 3 ) is the Silicon Valley-based open innovation and applied research and development center of NTT Group (which includes NTT Data, Dimension Data, NTT Communications, and Docomo). The NTT Group invests more than $2.5 billion a year in R&D to develop market-driven, customer-focused solutions and services. NTTi 3 and its world-class scientists and engineers partner with prominent technology companies and start-ups to deliver market-leading solutions that span strategy, business applications, data, and infrastructure. More information is available at 6