Vernon Turner is the Senior Vice President of IDC's Enterprise Infrastructure, Consumer, Network, Telecom and Sustainability Research. He currently sees four trends that, individually, are guaranteed to transform portions of our Internet-based economy. When considered collectively, they will be highly disruptive to the industry. They are cloud computing, big data analytics, mobility, and social business. He elaborates on how cloud computing is having a fundamental impact on our infrastructure, the way we manage our applications, and the challenges & opportunities these changes are creating as far as data centers and networks are concerned.
To respond as quickly as possible to new business services, automation is needed a lot. Data centers must house more servers and access more disk storage over more network switches, routers, and connections than ever before. Within this context, widespread virtualization in the data center enables cloud computing so that business requirements can be accommodated flexibly. The legacy “Spanning Tree Protocol” for enterprise networking cannot meet the needs of data center networks for Ethernet link subnets or live migration of virtual machines and converged network fabrics via data center bridging. A more efficient alternative – the Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) protocol – is needed to address problems in network path efficiency & concentration, and the inability to multipath and maintain network path stability within a single Ethernet link. Turner also believes that TRILL rollout will entail relentless efforts by network architects, CIOs, and cloud designers.
