Johannesburg, 20 Apr 2018
The next-generation data centre, the hyper-converged data centre and data centre 3.0, these are all terms used to describe the latest wave of data centre technology, says Rene Bosman, Manager at Infoblox Africa.
"If you rewind a little, the data centre has evolved in three waves. The first wave was the centralisation of computer resources into a mainframe; in the 1950s and 1960s IBM's mainframes enabled shared computing power between multiple people.
"In a reversal of this trend, the second wave of data centre technology was when everything deconsolidated in the 1980s, or what we call client and server environments, resulting in isolated environments that were very difficult to manage. In the past decade, we've seen a return to centralisation, with large amounts of (virtual) compute power housed in a central shared facility, ie, a data centre, which can be accessed from wherever you are in the organisation, even if you're off-site." This third generation also easily allows for sharing or moving resources to public or hybrid clouds.
The CIO is under increasing pressure to be more agile and to respond quickly to changing business needs. The data centre has to be able to deploy applications and resources as and when required, as well as have the ability to scale services and capacity up and down on demand. These capabilities just aren't possible for data centres built on legacy network technology. Traditional infrastructure just can't provide the automation, efficiency, visibility and security that today's companies demand.
He says: "Improving operational efficiencies is a key priority for most organisations, they need to do more with less resources. The obvious solution is to outsource, and offerings like Azure and AWS are coming into their own in providing that capability. Also, there is increasing pressure on the CIO to reduce the risk of IT security threats to the organisation."
In order to achieve these objective, organisations need to start thinking about automation and resource allocation, says Bosman. "It requires the centralisation of resources, centralised management of data centre resources and proper utilisation of all platforms in the data centre."
Organisations are turning to virtualisation to enable them to move resources easily, increase agility, improve productivity and address needs as they arise and on-demand. "We're seeing a shift towards hybrid cloud by organisations that no longer want to invest in resources that they'll only use at specific times. Instead they're using resources provided by a third party to meet the business's dynamic needs and achieve growth.
"What's critical," he continues, "is that you have an underlying platform that gives you enterprise-grade Domain Name System (DNS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) and IP Address Management (IPAM)."
If you consider a virtual environment, all cloud services require an IP address in order to communicate and to make them accessible. "This is frequently the missing link in the traditional data centre," says Bosman. "Everything is automated and provisioned, but the key thing that's missing is automated DDI (an abbreviation of DNS, DHCP and IPAM), which provides the ability to rapidly respond to business needs." If you want to have the ability to rapidly spin on or off compute resources, or dynamically move them to a cloud, you must have an automated DDI solution.
Every organisation will start to implement fully automated enterprise grade DDI that'll give them tighter integration with the existing automation they have in place, better visibility of the different platforms (cloud, public cloud and internal cloud) and help improve their security.
A key objective is to reduce the risk of threats, and DNS is the number one attack vector when it comes to threats, as evidenced by many recent data leaks. At the end of the day, every network element or user on the network requires an IP address and DNS record to communicate, and without having an enterprise-grade DDI solution, organisations will limit themselves in fully automating their data centre resources. In addition, if you don't secure your DNS, you are at risk.
"When we assess our customers DNS systems today, we always find security breaches using DNS to communicate to so-called command and control centres (or C2 servers). Data exfiltration (or data theft) using DNS is on the rise, and without securing your DNS, you won't even notice this is happening."
While security is a critical component of DDI, it also provides operational efficiency, agility, visibility and the ability to scale up and down on demand. Bosman concludes, "As network landscapes continue to evolve, driven by trends in security, virtualisation, cloud, Internet Protocol version 6 adoption (IPv6), and the IOT, organisations will require increasingly advanced solutions for managing critical network services in physical, virtual and cloud environments."
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