Proprietary Clouds

The current state of cloud computing is that cloud providers are building proprietary cloud services and APIs that do not interact with other clouds. In addition business and IT leaders of Global 2000 firms are exploring building their own private clouds in an effort to hold on to application control, ensure security and offer elastic IT services. Without an open or standard way of connecting clouds or allowing clouds to interact, isolated clouds will be the norm and a huge lost opportunity will result. Just like islands of isolated networks were the norm during the ’80s and early ’90s, open networking via TCP/IP and the Internet unleashed global productivity and innovation that parallels the industrial revolution. The IT industry is presented with an opportunity to again increase global productivity and innovation by interconnecting clouds or building more advanced network infrastructure capable of handling these new demands.

The Need For Infrastructure 2.0

While the cloud adoption cycle is young and the need for interaction/communication between public and private clouds may not be front and center, it’s only a matter of time before it is. In addition to employees deploying their own applications on corporate networks, IT departments are struggling to meet business expectations. For example, IDC recently predicted that between 2008 and 2012 IT staff will grow at about 1.1 times the rate of business growth while servers will grow at 1.9 times, mobile internet users will grow at 3 times, non-traditional user devices will grow at 3.6 times, information will grow at 4.5 times and interactions per day will grow at 8.4 times. With IT services demand skyrocketing and IT staff budgets being held tight, a gap between business expectation and IT delivery is growing. To close the gap today’s static, manually managed networks need a new economic and delivery model and for most cloud computing is the answer. Today IT growth is accommodated, if funded, within the confines or perimeter of an enterprise network and IT structure while being governed by business and IT leaders, but what if it moved to the cloud?

Consider if IT engages cloud services to meet these business expectations and demands. There would be increasing economic and performance pressures on networks to address the emergence of increasing system/cloud connectivity. Clearly IT organizations are not going to rely upon a single cloud provider to meet their business needs, but a group of providers that may specialize in SaaS/PaaS/IaaS, etc. Herein lies the rub: clouds are going to have to interact and communicate securely among each other if they are going to reach their potential and live up to their hype. If the above IT growth and associated dynamics shift to public clouds over the next 5 to 20 years, which is probable, then there are fundamentally new networking services that need to be designed and incorporated into internet architecture to support Infrastructure 2.0 cooperation.

A New IT Industry Phase

Before I highlight some of the Infrastructure 2.0 services that may be needed, I offer an industry perspective of similar industry transitions and their associated scale. Consider 1984 and the break-up of the Bell systems. Prior to ’84 most large corporations used public voice services to meet their needs. But when bulk T1 transmission services were offered at attractive tariffs most large corporations starting building private voice networks that ushered in companies such as Network Equipment Technologies, Timeplex, Newbridge Networks, et al. To counter this exodus of revenue, service providers offered with success voice private networks (VPNs) to woo enterprises back. In the early ’90s enterprise data networks were proprietary and private, running over leased lines; then, as these proprietary networking protocols such as DECnet, SNA, etc., gave way to open IP networking a huge shift occurred in telecommunications away from traditional PTT/Telecom service provider offerings toward open internet services, changing a $600B worldwide telecommunication market. During this phase Cisco Systems, Wellfleet Communications, Proteon and many others grew at unprecedented rates as LANs, WANs, ethernet switching and routing became essential business tools. Computing clearly benefited from the transition from proprietary-to-open/industry standards as UNIX and WinTel systems linked over open networks drove record corporate productivity and created a new IT industry structure.

Infrastructure 2.0 computing could represent the next phase of IT and be as disruptive as the shift from mainframe computing with SNA to mini-computers with peer-to-peer networking, to personal computing with client-server, to the Internet. With each IT industry phase or transition multi-billion dollar markets were created and the world economy grew thanks to productivity improvements. This shift promises a vast reduction in IT operational expenses along with productivity gains enabled by waves of innovation delivered via increasingly automated networks.

The Open Cloud of Clouds

During each of the above transitions IT leaders questioned vendor lock-in and the security of utilizing public IT services. More often than not, IT leaders were concerned if not frightened about the co-mingling of their bits/applications/compute/storage, etc., with other corporations. Each time the industry responded with a suite of security technology to comfort IT leaders and standards that offered a path away from vendor lock-in. Cloud computing and in particular a suite of open internet services for Infrastructure 2.0 communications could usher in the largest and most sweeping IT transformation yet. Dare I say it; open internet services for the “cloud of clouds” could have a larger economic and societal contribution than even the Internet. The Internet provides connectivity with a few popular applications, i.e., the web, email and increasingly voice and video. Infrastructure 2.0 has the potential to hollow out or outsource IT applications from corporations.

With an open approach to interconnecting clouds, cloud-computing services could scale, applications/objects/data, etc., could be portable, IT organizations could be offered control through visibility and a suite of management/troubleshooting tools could be exposed so that IT infrastructure placement is location/hosting independent. Think of it this way. If an open approach to Infrastructure 2.0 connections were available then a market place made up of cloud computing providers selling a wide range of services to IT departments and consumers could be created. IT leaders could shop the cloud providers, picking and choosing which ones to provide or host applications without being locked in and fearing loss of control plus security vulnerabilities. For example, change management could be policy-based or on demand, versus today’s model of manual configurations, spreadsheets and layers of processes created to compensate for human error potentials.
So what is needed for clouds to communicate with each other so that IT leaders can exploit the cloud for a larger and increasing set of their IT application portfolio while offering a competitive cloud environment for consumers? What follows are a few ideas that could move Infrastructure 2.0 forward.

Open Clouds: Cloud deployments are proprietary and thus there is little to no interoperability among them. To create a pro-competitive environment, clouds and the interconnection between them should be open and interoperable.

Greater Trust: Business and IT leaders plus consumers need to be able to trust cloud services. Ronald Reagan used to say, “trust but verify”; however, clouds need to be verified then trusted. To meet that end, embedded security services versus security appliances could be most effective at creating trust within and between clouds.

Cloud Common Registration System: To find objects, i.e., a VMs, applications, storage, data, etc., within and between clouds a registration system would be very helpful.

Portability: In order to move applications, VMs, data, objects, etc., between clouds portability and persistence is highly desirable.

Management and Visibility: To ensure troubleshooting, diagnostics, repair, modification and control of applications a set of Infrastructure 2.0 management and visibility services could ease the concerns of IT leaders and application developers over their loss of control.

A Means for Billing: A mechanism for providers to bill each other for services may be needed for connections between clouds.

The above is simply a sample of desirable Infrastructure 2.0 attributes. Much work needs to be done to develop an open framework, blue print or architecture. It’s not clear how long it will take to develop an evolved industry network architecture, but as more and more cloud services are consumed market demand will heat up for open approaches to portability, control, scale, security and the ability to mix and match cloud services to construct application portfolios. Infrastructure 2.0 is a game changer that promises to cast a new IT competitive landscape by offering a new standards-based approach to IT delivery.

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Borderless Networks Experience – The World is Your Workspace
See business innovation in action as Cisco customers and executives discuss how Borderless Networks enables greater productivity, collaboration and efficiency.

Borderless Networks Experience

Borderless Networks

Building Tomorrow’s Borderless Business
Enable a new borderless workspace experience at remote offices with Cisco Integrated Services Router Generation 2

Integrated Services Routers

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2036

The Borderless Network

We live in an ever-increasingly connected world where our workspace is with us constantly, independent of geographic location and user device. The days of boundaries or obstacles to accessing information which location, applications and devices erected are limited and dwindling. These boundaries are being torn down by business necessity, personal preferences and technical innovations. Businesses are increasingly expanding globally, increasing the geographic area in which they operate and from which they need access to information. The huge growth of the mobile internet provides insight into how work and work product has moved far beyond a stationary desk. It is technical innovations, however, that are ushering in a new borderless network architecture that’s delivering the capability to experience a workspace without borders, friction or frustration.

The rise of wireless networks, smartphones and the mobile internet has ushered in workspace mobility that tears down location boundaries. Application performance acceleration technology extends application access over large distances while presenting the user with an experience of being local. Network security services, especially identity and policy, preserve user preferences as they drift between workspace environments ensuring corporate assets are safe. Over the past 18 months, real-time and on-demand video has been embraced by business leaders as a way to be closer to customers, reduce travel cost and speed business processes. In the current business cycle, corporate networks will have to become even more borderless as cloud computing services, collaboration applications and virtualization technologies accelerate application access to any location and device on the planet.

For corporations the Borderless Network delivers value in two important ways. First is the frictionless movement of workflow consistently over a corporate network that is secure, mobile and as vast as a corporation’s employees, contractors, suppliers and customers. Second is the value of the increased customer experience which Borderless Networks deliver as existing and prospective customers are everywhere, interacting with your company on a plethora of devices. Customer service studies show that keeping customers connected or wired brings them closer to a business, improving their experience and increasing their loyalty.

So what boundaries does Cisco’s Borderless Networks bring down? It’s primarily focused on applications, devices and location boundaries, and since the network touches every IT asset Cisco believes that it can add network value to bring down these boundaries and replace them with a “Borderless Networks” experience. The Borderless Networks experience promises to enable access to information seamlessly, securely and reliably, independent of location and/or user device. This experience transcends employees and customers and for good reason: Forrester’s state of the CIO agenda identified that the two top CIO issues are to “acquire, retain and manage customer relationships better while lowering company operating costs”.

Borderless Networks is an architectural approach to networking that, if designed correctly, can automate business and network processes driving down operational cost, thus allowing IT to scale. And scale is something IT needs desperately right now. IDC recently predicted that between 2008 through 2012 IT staff will grow at about 1.1 times the rate of business growth while servers will grow at 1.9 times, mobile internet users will grow at 3 times, non-traditional user devices will grow at 3.6 times, information will grow at 4.5 times and interactions per day will grow at 8.4 times. Clearly, the gap between IT staff resources and business expectations for IT services is huge and growing fast. To close the “business expectation/availability” gap many IT leaders are evaluating cloud-based services to augment their homegrown services as IT leaders observe an increasing amount of applications being deployed from outside the enterprise perimeter. Salesforce.com, EC2, Google Apps and other cloud services will have a huge impact on IT. But the network needs to be an integration point in an IT architecture allowing homegrown, private and public cloud services to be deployed securely and reliably.

To put this into more general terms, have you ever tried to access video content while in a branch office?; or tried to access a corporate application while on the road?; or tried to dazzle a new customer with a live video session?; or have your work office IT environment be the same, if not better, at your home? If you have then you have experienced productivity breakers in your IT systems. If left unchecked and these barriers are allowed to persist, productivity will get worse. For example, desktop virtualization and video are two of the most disruptive new IT services which will have the biggest impact on barriers that exist between datacenter and the rest of the enterprise IT environment.

The productivity frustration or friction that is created in these scenarios is location, user devices and/or application access. Cisco’s Borderless Networks seeks to eliminate these boundaries with a consistent and secure user experience by enabling IT to scale and close the gap between business expectations and IT service availability with a suite of user network services around mobility, performance, and security.

To fully understand the shift in IT you need look no further than from where applications are being delivered and you’ll notice that the borders are changing. Instead of a corporation having one perimeter with well-defined internal/external trust relationships, corporations now have three new fronts or perimeters to manage. At the center of this new IT challenge is a shift in the way users are consuming technology. Employees are bringing more consumer-based IT technology into the workforce, whether it’s Kindle, an iPhone, a flip camera, etc. All of these technologies are entering the workforce, creating new borders. These new borders are different locations, different devices plus applications and services that are being deployed from anywhere.
IT’s problem has changed from managing performance, scalability, and availability across one domain to having to manage those attributes across three domains: device, location, and application. IT leaders now need to manage this multi-dimensional service delivery problem across devices, locations, and applications, and making matters even worse is that these borders are often in a non-IT-controlled environment.

Borderless Network Technical Architecture

The Borderless Networks business case is that Cisco’s network innovations are being focused on IT elements that will contribute to doing business faster, bring more scale to your business and grow the bottom line, by investing in technology that makes your business go easier, smoother and become more engaging with customers. As an example, a Borderless Network in a sports arena increased revenue by a factor of three by enabling food and merchandize orders to be placed by sport fans in their seats and delivered by a friendly salesperson. This scenario broke location, application and device barriers, increasing both customer experience and revenues. A network with borders could not deliver the experience and business outcome.

The Borderless Networks technical architecture is made up of three components. First is the separation of hardware and software. This decoupling of software from custom hardware appliances enables network services to be deployed quickly and flexibly around the enterprise, independent of location and hardware. The first example of this is in Cisco’s ISR G2 where IT leaders can load and activate network services on demand to branch offices. The second component is called converged systems, where compute, storage and network resources are coming together to define a new IT control plane. The third component is policy, being the unifier or the way to implement, automate and unify services end to end. These three components work together to create a more virtual networking environment where services can be turned on and off plus deployed on-demand to eliminate barriers and create a Borderless Network.

For example, security services such as firewall, IPS, encryption, etc., can be deployed for specific cloud services or to far reaches of a network to increase secure communications. Application acceleration may be controlled in a similar fashion increasing application performance to mobile end-points or speeding up video sessions to various parts of the network. The net goal is to ensure that the technologies Cisco brings to market across collaboration and virtualization tie closely and tightly couple with routing, switching, security, wireless, and optimization technologies that exist in the Borderless Network.

Borderless Network Value Proposition

What Cisco is building toward with Borderless Networks is to offer its customers a means to increase productivity. Productivity has been on the rise thanks to IT, which specifically started with the PC. Networks helped drive productivity growth even higher. The economy is now at the next point of productivity growth with Borderless Networks, virtualization and cloud computing offering a path to close the business expectation and IT availability gap. For business leaders an opportunity is being presented to break with the status quo of being confined to a single perimeter or break away and embrace technology trends that increase customer experience and lower operational cost by opening up to new perimeters of location, devices and applications securely and reliable with a Borderless Network. If architected correctly a business can grow its top and bottom line faster.

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A new era in Enterprise IT is emerging. It’s an era born out of systemic business efficiency planning prompted by the efforts of business leaders to reduce corporate spending as revenues declined during the market crash of 2008. To reduce operational spend, get closer to customers, automate new streamlined business processes and position their firms for the current economic recovery, IT leaders are reviewing IT solutions, particularly data center consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing and branch offices. In this white paper we describe the macro trends taking shape in business and explore how these trends are creating a new era in branch office IT fueled by cost reduction and improved customer experience. We review next generation branch office IT attributes and best practices to leverage their value.

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Low latency networks for distributed applications have become a competitive advantage for financial institutions with algorithmic trading platforms, where delay in trades impacts profits. The latency requirements for applications like high frequency trading, derivative pricing, and latency arbitrage are much stricter than for traditional web applications, such as VoIP and network gaming. While traditional applications can tolerate more than 100 milliseconds of one-way packet latency, algorithmic trading is sensitive to milliseconds, microseconds, or less. Market demand for ultra low latency networking is growing rapidly and the time resolution scale has shifted by several orders of magnitude from milliseconds to microseconds and less. This paper describes methods for meeting these more stringent performance constraints with finer resolution and more accurate measurements of latency and jitter than ever before.

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Virtualization and UC application migration onto the datacenter are happening side by side and create an interesting and challenging dilemma. Virtualization today is primarily being applied to traditional server-based applications with flexible minimum response times, low utilization rates, and low input/output requirements. The requirements are quite the opposite for real-time communications where application delay is not permitted. A disadvantage of virtualization has been that application efficiencies can be lost as the virtual machine accesses the hardware indirectly. This IDC white paper addresses the question: Can virtualization support real-time communications?

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