C-Change 2013: Network needs to be re-defined for future

BANGALORE, INDIA: A few statistics to begin with:

5 billion connected devices in India in 2013

14 billion connected devices in five years

76 billion applications being downloaded

Proliferation of number of mobile devices, such as smartphones, netbooks, notebooks

2.1 billion internet users today globally

What do these signify? All of these signify that networks are today carrying several times the traffic it ever carried in the past and needs to be re-defined to make it future ready.

"More than 75 per cent of data centre traffic is travelling horizontally and not just from top to bottom as before. so a lot of work needs to be done at the back-end to make it possible at a fast pace," noted Sajan Paul, director - Systems Engineering, Juniper Networks, India.

Software defined networking (SDN), cloud and mobilty are some of the major trends in the market and all of it call for a new form of network, he added.

"At its core, the SDN approach aims to extract more value from the network, by allowing applications to interact with the network, optimize resource allocation, and collect important intelligence from the network," he added.

In order to support such environment in future, one needs to create a new fabric that centralizes all applications inside date centre, run software that is capable of handling all dynamic and cloud applications, and secure them over the cloud.