Why Networks Are Key to a Smarter Data Center

I'm excited to announce the findings of three months of Futuriom custom research: Networks are seen as a key component of delivering performance to high-performance data centers, particularly those fueling cloud and SaaS applications.

The results for Futuriom’s “Untold Secrets of the Efficient Data Center,” released today, reveals that data-center managers, networking, and technology professionals are looking for smarter, more efficient data center networks that can support virtualization better as an alternative to adding more bandwidth and service processing power.

There are several reasons for this. One is that new cloud applications are putting more demands than ever on data centers, due the phenomenon known as "East-West" traffic, in which traffic being sent among servers inside a data center far outstrips the traffic communicating with the outside world. For this reason, networks need to scale to support hundreds or even thousands of servers that may be communicating with each other. It also means that networks are a key place to target improved data-center performance, rather than brute-force approaches such as adding more servers and bandwidth.

"Untold Secrets of the Efficient Data Center" details these trends as well as the many technologies that are changing the face of data-center technology, including SmartNICs (Smart Network Interface Cards), AI and machine learning (ML), hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), and software-defined network (SDN) and security. End users see many potential benefits in upgrading the network for data centers. These benefits include faster application performance (64%), stronger security (59%), greater flexibility (57%), and application reliability (57%).

The new report is based on Futuriom’s Data Center Network Efficiency Survey targeted, which targeted 218 IT professionals about their views on networks in the data center (DC).

(Disclosure: The research for this report was sponsored by Mellanox, although all research was conducted independently.)

Vitualization, SmartNICs in Demand

The survey shows that end users have broad interest in virtualization and data-center optimization techniques. Network optimization technologies are in high demand from IT and networking professionals and they are seen as a key way to improve DC performance.

One of the technology groups that draws the most interest is SmartNIcs and processor offload, which can speed up existing network connections and processing power. For example, respondents were asked to rank different technological approaches to improving data center performance. “Improve the efficiency of networks using techniques such as processor offload and SmartNICs” got the highest average ranking of 2.77, and “Improve the efficiency of application code” got the second-highest ranking, with an average of 2.85. “Deploy more servers” had the lowest ranking of 3.45 (respondents were asked to rank the technologies from 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest).

The pyramid chart below shows the technology approaches ranked from highest (top of the pyramid) to the lowest (bottom of the pyramid), with the average ranking displayed (1 was being the highest).