BANGALORE, INDIA: The latest to enter the networking space, IBM recently set-up a networking lab in Bangalore to focus on data centre networking, with a special focus on data centre network management.

Inder Gopal, vice president, System's Networking Development, System Technology, IBM, in an interview with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL talks about why this traditional, IT and storage vendor decided to step into networking space and how it will go about. Excerpts:

CIOL: What has changed in the data centre networking space over the past few years?

Inder Kumar: Data centre networking has changed a lot in the last five-to-six years owing to several factors.

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One is virtualisation, where rather than having applications bound to a particular server, virtual machines can be moved from server to server. So when one server gets overloaded you can quickly move it to a different VM, which is causing increased traffic and thus pressurizing data centre.

The second is the nature of traffic. In the past, data centre traffic was usually from a data centre server to an outside user. Whereas, today a whole lot of traffic is moving within data centres and this real-time communication is causing a lot of traffic, wherein requirements in terms of legacy is much more than what you had when traffic was unidirectional.

The third thing that has changed is that several customers are looking for cost-cutting measures and are cutting staff in data centres. Thus they want things to be simpler as they don't have many skilled people, unlike before. Thus they want a data centre solution that is already integrated and unified.

Moreover, rather than considering a data centre on the lines of storage, network, and server, people have started considering it an integrated system where everything is unified and optimised. This has dramatically changed the way how data centres operate or customers buy.

CIOL: Just because virtualisation will pressurize data centres, people will not stop doing it as it gives them a lot of benefits. So what should be the ideal manner to go about without pressurizing data centre?

Inder: People virtualise because it gives them flexibility in managing data centre workload. However, even if they move a workload from one VM to another, the server will continue to communicate with whichever application it was communicating with before.

Moreover, when a traffic moves from one network to another, it needs to have certain level of quality in terms of performance and security.

And the network has to support this migration along with the workload's. For this the setting of the network has to be changed so that it adapts, which calls for intelligent networks.

A network cannot be a dumb switch, but should be smart and understand that the virtual environment has changed and then automatically adapt to the new set of requirements in the network.

IBM is building such intelligent networks which are virtualisation aware. These switches will be attached to network, storage and server and we can offer it to our customers as an integrated product.

IBM has server and storage and what we did not have in the past was networking. We used to work with partners to do networking.

Now, we will be building a network division, where we will build our own network product and connect it to our storage and server and create an end-to-end system that customers are looking for.

We launched a new networking division, System Networking, in September 2010, when IBM acquired Blade Network Technology, a California-based networking company.