Data Center LAN Migration Guide - Juniper Networks

Why Migrate?
Data Center LAN Migration Guide
IT continues to become more tightly integrated with business across all industries and markets. Technology is the
means by which enterprises can provide better access to information in near or real time to satisfy customer needs,
while simultaneously driving new efficiencies. However, today’s enterprise network infrastructures face growing
scalability, agility, and security challenges. This is due to factors such as increased collaboration with business
partners, additional workforce mobility, and the sheer proliferation of users with smart mobile devices requiring
constant access to information and services. These infrastructure challenges are seriously compounded when growth
factors are combined with the trend towards data center consolidation. What is needed is a new network infrastructure
that is more elastic, more efficient, and can easily scale.
Scalability is a high priority, as it is safe to predict that much of the change facing businesses today is going to come as
a requirement for more storage, more processing power, and more flexibility.
Recent studies by companies such as IDC suggest that global enterprises will be focusing their investments and
resources in the next 5 to 10 years on lowering costs while continuing to look for new growth areas. Industry analysts
have identified several key data center business initiatives that align with these directions:
• Data center consolidation: Enterprises combine data centers as a result of merger or acquisition to reduce cost as
well as centralize and consolidate resources.
• Virtualization: Server virtualization is used to increase utilization of CPU resources, provide flexibility, and deliver
“on-demand” services that easily scale (currently the most prevalent virtualization example).
• Cloud computing: Pooling resources within a cloud provides a cost-efficient way to reconfigure, reclaim, and reuse
resources to deliver responsive services.
• I/O convergence or consolidation: Ethernet and Fibre Channel are consolidated over a single wire on the server side.
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI): Applications are run on centralized servers to reduce operational costs and
also provide greater flexibility.
These key initiatives all revolve around creating greater data center efficiencies. While meeting these business
requirements, it is vital that efficient solutions remain flexible and scalable systems are easy to manage to maximize
all aspects of potential cost savings.
In today’s data center, applications are constantly being introduced, updated, and retired. Demand for services is
unpredictable and ever changing. Remaining responsive, and at the same time cost efficient, is a significant resource
management challenge, and adding resources needs to be a last resort since it increases the cost basis for service
production and delivery. Having the ability to dynamically reconfigure, reclaim, and reuse resources positions the data
center to effectively address today’s responsiveness and efficiency challenges.
Furthermore, existing three-tier architectures are built around a client/server model that is less relevant in today’s
application environment. Clearly, a new data center LAN design is needed to adapt to changing network dynamics,
overcome the complexity of scaling with the current multitiered architecture, as well as capitalize on the benefits of
high-performance platforms and a simplified design.
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