The reality? Implementing a virtualization strategy or putting everything in the cloud is not sufficient to gain agility and improved application deployment speeds while building Next-Generation data centers. Virtualization is only one piece of the puzzle. There are still a lot of other challenges to be addressed like full end-to-end automation, unified management that works seamlessly across your entire infrastructure – physical, virtual or cloud – and visibility to troubleshoot issues. Infoblox’s multi-cloud, multi-platform capabilities use Actionable Network Intelligence to provide solutions to all of these challenges and more.
Before we go deeper into the challenges, let’s understand why companies are building Next-Generation data centers. IT has become a critical and strategic priority in organizations. CIOs want IT to be more strategic to the business. However, traditional IT processes and legacy infrastructure slows IT responsiveness and they cannot meet the demands of lines of business for faster provisioning of services. The solution? Transform the datacenters and modernize them. The Next-Generation datacenter is every CIO’s dream, which promises to
- increase agility
- provide superior customer experience
- reduce risk
- do more with less
- use IT to grow the business
Every organization is in a different stage in their data center journey. Some have started automating certain aspects of application deployment using scripts or tools, some are father along and using virtualization to reduce datacenter footprint while still others are leading the transformation to private or hybrid cloud deployments. Transformation doesn’t happen over night, which means the data center needs to be able to simultaneously support a combination of physical, virtual or cloud environments.
A recent study conducted by ReRez research showed that 94% of IT professionals are involved with shifting to Next-Generation datacenters and 73% of CIOs budget for cloud today. The main idea is that infrastructure should be subservient to applications. Application is king. Some projects that are driving the transformation include:
- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure roll out
- Datacenter automation to achieve agility and minimize ticketing between teams
- Datacenter consolidation to move workloads from physical to virtual infrastructure and reduce datacenter footprint
- Hybrid cloud migration
- DevOps for automated, rapid testing and publishing of software
But there are challenges in getting there.
- Agility: Agility can be hampered by manual processes for core network services like DNS and IPAM. Manual processes are time consuming, prone to errors and cannot scale. Getting DNS and IPAM info for virtual machines includes crossing silos between datacenter teams and network teams. Silos introduce internal friction and delays.
- Disparate platforms: 79% of those surveyed by ReRez research said that they use three or more cloud platforms in the datacenter. When disparate platforms are used, it introduces operational inefficiencies as these platforms don’t work well with each other and need separate tools to manage them.
- Visibility: Next-Generation datacenters also deal with a lack of single pane of glass visibility across the diverse infrastructure in use – physical, virtual, public, and hybrid environments. No holistic view means lack of control, not having an accurate view of resource allocation, and inefficient management.
- Security and compliance: Security and compliance is a big challenge especially when networks and datacenters are getting more complex and diverse. There may be gaps like DNS, which is the number one application layer attack vector and used frequently by malware as a control plane for command and control. Data exfiltration via DNS is another rising concern that needs to be addressed. Also knowing whether the various datacenter elements are compliant is challenging especially when there is limited visibility.
Infoblox can address these datacenter challenges with:
- Automation for core network services – DNS, DHCP, IPAM
- Single unified management platform
- APIs for multiple virtualization and cloud platforms
- Enhanced visibility of datacenter resources whether in physical, virtual or cloud
- Scale to support highly dynamic workloads
- Context-aware security in any environment – physical, virtual or cloud
So if you think implementing virtualization or putting everything in the cloud will give you faster application deployment speeds and agility, it’s time to think again. It’s time to think about automation for your core network services, visibility and unified management using actionable network intelligence.
To get a quick overview of Infoblox for Next-Generation Data Centers, read this eBook or watch this video.
