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Network as a Service: Open Source Enables Efficient Cloud Hosting

2010-03-09 14:30
To keep up with the growth of cloud computing and virtualization, networks keep evolving. But unlike Twitter s Trending Topics, IT budgets don t scale up. In fact one of the major initiatives in many IT shops is creatively reduce their own expense. To get to a scalable cloud infrastructure where costs are contained, it sounds like the network industry is going to see a time where a Linux arrives on the scene. An open source alternative to building networks may disrupt the networking landscape and give network admins an open source network operating system. Sponsor Virtualization: It s in the Network Too Distributing workload across machines, storage, and environments has required networks to be smarter than ever. Now, the network needs to be intelligent enough to not only route traffic both a bridge and a toll-gate, but to also provision and de-provision all aspects of the environment at a moments notice. Providers like Rackspace are in the business of using the network to optimize the performance of the entire data center. To be effective in keeping up with dynamic system provisioning, technical teams need access to all tiers of the computing environment to reduce operations overhead. Hosting providers, such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace innovate new integration patterns - including ones in the core of the network - to get their job done. Network operating systems that are open, like Extreme XOS enable large scale hosting providers to look deeper into networking gear and start to tune it themselves. And enterprises may follow this trend. Servers Don t Sleep at Night, but Applications and Admins Do For a long time, networks have been used to detect the peers and devices. Many of us use the nearly ubiquitous DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), which is the the thing that automatically assigns IP addresses to a PC when plugging into the network. In an analogy, there is a need for a super DHCP is needed that can keep up with the highly virtualized cloud infrastructure per virtual instance. To do this, engineers look deeper to find efficiencies in how the network talks to the hardware and software for the virtual machines. A good example of benefit for this is where a resource has peak loads during the day. Due to natural usage, the applications compute power is not utilized during the night. Using monitoring and provisioning tools, the network can de-provision the extra hardware and offer it to another service. This freeing up allocation saves power and money. This is a simple example of where virtual data center solutions are being innovated in the industry to figure out how to further timeshare the computing resources. The network has the ability to help manage the scale down to the moment is enabled by it s reach to everything over IP (Internet Protocol). The Open Network Wins, Developers Rule Extreme Networks is betting IT leaders that have become very familiar with Linux and open source Hypervisors like XEN want to tweak the n...
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