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In Hyperscale Environments Network Visibility Remains Vital

Mike Heumann

Hyperscale infrastructure was once widely considered to be designed for large, web-facing organizations or top-tier colocation and cloud providers. But as the enterprise starts to confront the realities of big data and mobile, dynamic workloads, it seems inevitable that even medium-sized organizations will have to encounter hyperscale environments at some point, either as greenfield deployments or in a hosted/cloud capacity – and we’re seeing this come to fruition. According to an October 2014 Emulex survey of more than 1,600 US and European IT professionals who provided insight into their enterprise data center networking environments, 57 percent of respondents have adopted hyperscale networking environments.

What are the ramifications of this? More than half of these (51 percent) named increasing bandwidth as a major challenge in moving to hyperscale environments, which is driving massive network upgrades. In fact, more than 77 percent of respondents running hyperscale environments say the move to the cloud has already necessitated the upgrade of their networks to at least 40Gb Ethernet. Big data and analytics are driving high volumes of data storage, capture, movement and archiving which all drive an increased need for both higher bandwidth and lower latency on 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet using RDMA.

We’re seeing hyperscale network environments grow across enterprises because it has a number of benefits: It can be a key piece of smarter, more manageable application ecosystems. On a network level, hyperscale can also aid business continuity and disaster recovery efforts by providing redundant failover architecture and rapid recovery. Hyperscale can also accentuate the benefits that technologies like virtualization and software-defined networking provide, making it a potentially vital configuration in the more scalable data center machinery of the future.

As we know, the loss of application or network services for even a few minutes can mean huge and immediate revenue losses, and can impact long-term customer loyalty. As many enterprises go through these rapid network changes and as hyperscale environments become more common, it is important that IT networking and application staffs prioritize network visibility as a means to identify any network issues that need to be identified quickly. Many organizations are struggling to accurately monitor increasingly complex enterprise networks as they shift to 10Gb Ethernet or even higher speeds.  

For those running hyperscale environments, 97 percent said it has necessitated a move to 10GbE, 40GbE or higher speeds to meet demands of high-performance applications such as big data, analytics and content distribution, compared to only 48 percent of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations. As a result, the underlying communication networks matter, and perhaps not surprisingly, capturing network behavior for incident detection and monitoring network flows for anomalous behavior are just as important. The ability to do both of these is essential in many high-speed networks (such as trading platforms and e-commerce portals) in order to spot cyber threats like DDoS attacks. The migration to larger, faster networks only exacerbates the threat of missing these attacks, and increases the need for clear, deep visibility.

Mike Heumann is VP of Product Marketing and Alliances at Emulex.

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In Hyperscale Environments Network Visibility Remains Vital

Mike Heumann

Hyperscale infrastructure was once widely considered to be designed for large, web-facing organizations or top-tier colocation and cloud providers. But as the enterprise starts to confront the realities of big data and mobile, dynamic workloads, it seems inevitable that even medium-sized organizations will have to encounter hyperscale environments at some point, either as greenfield deployments or in a hosted/cloud capacity – and we’re seeing this come to fruition. According to an October 2014 Emulex survey of more than 1,600 US and European IT professionals who provided insight into their enterprise data center networking environments, 57 percent of respondents have adopted hyperscale networking environments.

What are the ramifications of this? More than half of these (51 percent) named increasing bandwidth as a major challenge in moving to hyperscale environments, which is driving massive network upgrades. In fact, more than 77 percent of respondents running hyperscale environments say the move to the cloud has already necessitated the upgrade of their networks to at least 40Gb Ethernet. Big data and analytics are driving high volumes of data storage, capture, movement and archiving which all drive an increased need for both higher bandwidth and lower latency on 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet using RDMA.

We’re seeing hyperscale network environments grow across enterprises because it has a number of benefits: It can be a key piece of smarter, more manageable application ecosystems. On a network level, hyperscale can also aid business continuity and disaster recovery efforts by providing redundant failover architecture and rapid recovery. Hyperscale can also accentuate the benefits that technologies like virtualization and software-defined networking provide, making it a potentially vital configuration in the more scalable data center machinery of the future.

As we know, the loss of application or network services for even a few minutes can mean huge and immediate revenue losses, and can impact long-term customer loyalty. As many enterprises go through these rapid network changes and as hyperscale environments become more common, it is important that IT networking and application staffs prioritize network visibility as a means to identify any network issues that need to be identified quickly. Many organizations are struggling to accurately monitor increasingly complex enterprise networks as they shift to 10Gb Ethernet or even higher speeds.  

For those running hyperscale environments, 97 percent said it has necessitated a move to 10GbE, 40GbE or higher speeds to meet demands of high-performance applications such as big data, analytics and content distribution, compared to only 48 percent of respondents from non-hyperscale organizations. As a result, the underlying communication networks matter, and perhaps not surprisingly, capturing network behavior for incident detection and monitoring network flows for anomalous behavior are just as important. The ability to do both of these is essential in many high-speed networks (such as trading platforms and e-commerce portals) in order to spot cyber threats like DDoS attacks. The migration to larger, faster networks only exacerbates the threat of missing these attacks, and increases the need for clear, deep visibility.

Mike Heumann is VP of Product Marketing and Alliances at Emulex.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...

Cloud computing has transformed how we build and scale software, but it has also quietly introduced one of the most persistent challenges in modern IT: cost visibility and control ... So why, after more than a decade of cloud adoption, are cloud costs still spiraling out of control? The answer lies not in tooling but in culture ...