By Patrick Burke

The networking layer of the data center may be the next segment of IT to undergo some disruption, putting it on par with servers and storage, which have seen major changes with the help of cloud computing, virtualisation and other trends designed to improve efficiency and performance.

Software-defined networking, or SDN, has been around for several years now and is utilized by such big-name players as Rackspace.

But the technology is poised to gain more of a foothold in the data center. SDN offers clients more flexibility and less down time if they need to expand from their current server usage.

For the most part, networking has not evolved at the same pace as servers and storage, and networking has become somewhat of a costly bottleneck. SDN’s goal is to take tasks currently handled by hardware and perform these tasks in the software.

The intelligence of …

I saw an unfortunate piece on the Harvard Business Review website the other day that allleged that marketers are “flunking” the Big Data test. The article pointed to a survey that said 89% of marketers surveyed at Fortune 1000 companies use Big Data for only 11% of their customer-related decisions.

The article also made this amazing statement, completely unsupported by any data: “in today’s volatile business environment, judgment built from past experience is increasingly unreliable.” The article went on to cite “once-valid assumptions (such as) older consumers don’t use Facebook or send text messages” that are now erroneous and can presumably sink the intrepid marketer as he or she ventures forth to serve customers.

I ask, who amongst us has ever thought Facebook was the province of the young? Hasn’t it been common (and correct) wisdom for years that a large part of Facebook’s success is based on parents and grandparents (you know, “old people”) using digital cameras and Facebook as today’s Polaroid?

Further, didn’t a generation of Baby Boomer parents get cellphones for their tweens and teens precisely so they could text them at any time to try to keep tabs on them?

The HBR article sets up a strawman argument and a false dichotomy. The fact is, Big Data as defined today is still in its infancy. Many Big Data streams are so large that the software samples it, actually using only 5-10% of it. Other Big Data apps may be set to collect something that a marketing person sees of no value for a particular campaign: the old chestnut, GIGO rears its ugly head again.

Marketing departments, particularly at large-volume, consumer-oriented companies (eg food and drink, clothing, retail) have been the most voracious consumers of data and statistics on the planet for generations now. But they like to see valid data. They like to see useful data.

Big Data is just not mature enough to meet these needs consistently. It’s not a matter of the smart person using data analytics and the stupid person using “gut feeling.” It’s a matter of all marketers using Big Data where it seems to be most relevant. And today, that’s apparently true in 11% of their decisions.

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According to analyst house Gartner, the global app development market is going to hit £5.7 billion ($9bn) by the end of the year, a 1.7% upturn on 2011.

As their latest report, entitled ‘Market Trends: Application Development Software Worldwide’ notes, this will come as a result of the cloud significantly altering the landscape in terms of deploying, designing and testing apps.

Asheesh Raina, Gartner principal research analyst, said: “Application modernisation and increasing agility will continue to be a solid driver for AD spending, apart from other emerging dynamics of cloud, mobility and social computing”.

Specifically, Gartner cited the following as pivotal to app development growth:

• Evolving software delivery models
• New development methodologies
• Emerging mobile application development
• Open source software

The Gartner report notes that cost, agility, flexibility and speed are the key reasons why app developers would want to “cloud-enable” their software.

“Application development for cloud demands rapid …

Not only are more businesses adopting some form of cloud technology, they are feeling better doing it. A recent survey of 500 IT decision-makers found that 85 percent felt more positive about the benefits of using cloud computing, up from 72 percent in 2011, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The survey, conducted by IT industry association CompTIA, found that more than eight in 10 companies use some form of cloud technology. For many companies, the cloud is defined by a SaaS offering like Web email, but almost a quarter reported that cloud components made up between 30 percent and 50 percent of their overall IT architecture. More than half said they planned to increase investments by 10 percent or more over the course of the year. When asked to identify the top driver for cloud implementation, 50 percent of respondents picked “Cost-cutting,” but “Simply better option” and “Modernization of legacy IT” were not far behind in votes.

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“We are excited to enable the next generation of software-defined data centers and drive complexity out of the most challenging layer of the data center today — storage,” said Anil Virmani, senior vice president of engineering at Coraid, as the Redwood City based leading developer of Ethernet-based storage solutions today unveiled its EtherCloud™ platform for software-defined storage.

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Infrastructure metrics have always been focused on speeds and feeds. Throughput, packets per second, connections per second, etc… These metrics have been used to evaluate and compare network infrastructure for years, ultimately being used as a critical component in data center design.
This makes sense. After all, it’s not rocket science to figure out that a firewall capable of handling 10,000 connections per second (CPS) will overwhelm a next hop (load balancer, A/V scanner, etc… ) device only capable of 5,000 CPS.

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