Network investment key to virtualisation success

Enterprises looking to save money through server virtualisation must be prepared to make investments in five key areas, according to a new report from analyst firm Forrester.

The report, called The Datacentre Network Evolution: Five Reasons This Isn't Your Dad's Network, argues that moves to virtual servers are an acknowledgment of the fact that bandwidth is not infinite and firms no longer want to keep adding it to their datacentres.

Forrester analyst Andre Kindness predicted that virtualisation would remain an important part of cost-cutting plans in the coming year and said that in order to make sure that they make the most of it, enterprises would have to make five key investments.

These are in virtual switches, hybrid switches, converged switching architecture, meshed topologies and automation.

“After years of just 'throwing bandwidth' at the problem, today’s [teams] are finding they need to build fundamentally different networks that accommodate advances in server virtualisation and storage networking and pave the path to cloud computing,” said Kindness in the report.

Kindness added that by moving to the cloud, firms could move away from what he called bloated, static networks and into a "dynamic, efficient system". He explained that doing this required the adoption of the five key technologies mentioned above.

Virtual switches, for example, will grow in use as firms seek to avoid being locked into specific vendors' hardware. Kindness said that they would be based on more open standards and would let enterprises use them in much more fluid ways.

Kindness added that while hardware will change, so too will the people that manage it.

“The traditional teams that reported up to the CIO will evolve into pools for design, deployment, maintenance, and upgrades to service the advanced applications being deployed on the next-generation network,” he explained.