How are Cloud Services Challenging the Network?

The seemingly endless demand for Cloud Services is driving the need for more data center capacity. This trend is also driving the need for greater bandwidth and intelligent networks for users to access these Cloud services. It is not just Enterprises driving demand for data center capacity from companies like Salesforce.com or Amazon Web Services by using public Cloud services.  Social media companies like Facebook,  Google and Yahoo are expanding their own data centers to meet escalating user growth. So how are companies going to change their data center infrastructure to meet this growing demand?

From an Enterprise perspective, the Cloud business model is too compelling to ignore. The Cloud offers an elastic model that allows infrastructure capacity to be increased and decreased on demand. The Cloud’s usage-based model helps enterprises increase business agility and reduce costs by reducing or eliminating the need for their own data center infrastructure. Despite all the benefits, some enterprises have been cautious about moving to the Cloud because of concerns about availability, security, and application performance.

So how can Cloud Service Providers convince Enterprises that their Cloud services address these concerns? By ensuring that the Cloud provider infrastructure – that includes servers, networking equipment, applications, and services – are highly available, secure, tightly interconnected and offer excellent application performance. This will enable the Cloud providers to further differentiate their services from other providers and monetize the cloud based revenue opportunity. It is important to note that some Enterprises are also offering their own Cloud services to create new revenue streams. Apple’s iCloud is a perfect example for an Enterprise delivering cloud services from their own data centers or private cloud.

So how will Enterprises and Service Providers deliver scalable, secure and optimized applications from the Cloud? The evolution of networking infrastructure to meet these demands is commonly referred to as IP next-generation networks (IP-NGN). The IP NGN provides the network infrastructure that connects users and enterprises to the Cloud with high-availability, leveraging cloud resources across geographically distributed data centers using Cisco’s  data center interconnect (DCI)  technologies.

Cisco first addressed this trend with the Cisco 7200 Series of routers, however with the growing demand for bandwidth it soon became necessary to develop a new platform that could handle multiple services, with higher availability, higher throughput, enhanced security and an optimized application experience. The new platform was the Cisco Aggregation Services Router 1000 Series . Both Enterprises and Service Providers have embraced the ASR 1000 across the globe and demand has driven the need for different sizes of ASR 1000 platform with different throughputs and port density without compromising on the ASR 1000 core values.