PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD Bringing Cloud Agility, Scalability and Simplicity to the Enterprise Data Center WHITE PAPER Executive Summary Enterprises are introducing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) to accelerate the pace of innovation, reduce TCO and streamline operations. By consolidating compute and storage resources onto common infrastructure, IT organizations and cloud builders can contain equipment sprawl and reduce administrative complexity. But legacy data center networking solutions and disjointed administrative practices can impair IT service agility and hinder large-scale HCI adoption. Plexxi HCN™ for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud eliminates common HCI networking barriers, helping businesses accelerate time-to-value, increase IT service velocity and ensure high performance and reliability for cloud-based applications and services. Unlike traditional IT solutions based on fixed-hardware configurations, Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud is fully software-defined, making networking for enterprise cloud infrastructure truly easy to design, deploy and scale. Plexxi HCN slashes infrastructure cost and complexity, bringing cloud agility, scalability and simplicity to the enterprise data center. This white paper reviews hyperconverged infrastructure business drivers and networking challenges; describes the features, functions and benefits of Plexxi HCN for Nutanix Enterprise Cloud; and provides a reference architecture and sample configurations for cloud builders, system integrators and IT architects. Introduction—The Rise of the Cloud Businesses in every industry are turning to cloud-based infrastructure to increase business agility and accelerate digital transformation. Cloud compute and storage services help companies avoid capital equipment expenses, accelerate time-to-value and focus scarce resources on core business initiatives. Smaller companies, startups and individual business units within larger enterprises are using public cloud services like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform to minimize upfront investments and jumpstart new initiatives. And larger companies are using hybrid clouds—employing a mix of public and private infrastructure—to enable DevOps and deliver applications with diverse performance, security and compliance requirements. © PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 1 Cloud adoption has moved well beyond the early adoption stage. Gartner estimates global PaaS and IaaS spending exceeded $46 billion in 2017.1And a RightScale 2018 survey of nearly 1000 SMB and enterprise IT professionals reveals 63% of organizations have deployed multiple projects and applications in the cloud.2 Figure 1 - SMB and Enterprise Cloud Maturity Survey Results 8% 10% 19% 32% 31% NO WATCHER BEGINNER INTERMEDIATE ADVANCED PLANS PLANNING FIRST PROJECTS APPS RUNNING HEAVY USE Source: RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report The Boomerang Effect Bringing Applications Back to the Enterprise As businesses scale their cloud deployments many are learning that public cloud services don’t live up to the hype. Complex pricing models with excessive add-on fees and high usage charges can hamper economics. And latency issues can hinder application performance, impairing quality of experience and customer satisfaction. Many businesses are moving applications back to the enterprise, introducing private clouds to regain control over infrastructure and rein in costs. In a 2017 KeyBanc Capital Markets survey nearly 53% of respondents said they have moved workloads back from the public cloud due to cost (47%), performance (32%), compliance (15%) or other reasons. Forty-one percent moved back Tier 1 applications and thirty-three percent moved back Tier 2 applications.3 Agile Development Demands Agile Infrastructure The cloud lays the foundation for today’s agile software development and deployment practices. Development organizations are using continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps to improve collaboration and productivity, and accelerate the pace of innovation. By delivering incremental features and fixes quickly and efficiently, development teams can be more flexible and responsive to customer needs and business demands. Self-serve IT and on-demand services are essential for enabling agile development and delivery. Developers, test engineers and operators must be able to stand up virtual infrastructure quickly and easily to streamline application lifecycle management and efficiently move releases from private builds, to development, to test, to production. Hyperconverged Infrastructure—the Technology of Choice for the Private Cloud Forward-looking businesses are turning to hyperconverged infrastructure to power private clouds. Traditional siloed enterprise data center designs aren’t well suited for delivering on-demand infra- structure and elastic services. Most incumbent data centers are composed of discrete compute, storage and storage networking platforms with distinct management interfaces. 1Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud Services Revenue to Reach $260 Billion in 2017, October 12, 2017 2RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report™, January 2018 33Q17 VAR Survey and Earnings Preview, KeyBanc Capital Markets, October 16, 2017 © PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 2 These disjointed architectures are inherently costly and complex to deploy (individual system components must be sourced, integrated and tested), operate (each technology platform consumes power, cooling and rack space), and manage (each platform supports unique, often low-level, administrative interfaces and APIs). Hyperconverged infrastructure solutions help IT organizations and cloud builders improve economics, simplify operations and accelerate service velocity by consolidating hypervisor, compute, storage, and storage networking functions onto common hardware with unified administrative and programming interfaces. HCI platforms help enterprises achieve cloud agility and simplicity, while regaining control of their infrastructure. Legacy Network Solutions and Disjointed Administrative Practices can Impair Large-Scale HCI Adoption Unfortunately, many businesses fail to fully consider data center networking implications and requirements when planning private cloud and HCI initiatives. Many organizations operate the network as a discrete technology silo, managed by a separate team using distinct administrative tools and practices. Networking infrastructure is typically deployed and provisioned independently of compute and storage infrastructure, consuming time and human resources. Legacy data center networking solutions and fractured administrative practices can hinder IT service agility and impair large-scale HCI adoption. It can take days or even weeks to stand up networking infrastructure to support new applications and projects. Worse still, legacy data center networks designed to support traditional client-server applications can’t handle the dynamic workloads and diverse traffic flows that dominate the contemporary data center. In short, the network has become a barrier to innovation. To take full advantage of all the benefits of hyperconvergence, private cloud builders must take a fresh look at the data center network. The modern data center demands a modern data center network. “ Enterprises have embraced hyperconverged infrastructure as a means of building software-defined datacenters. Unfortunately, networking is often overlooked as an integral element in HCI offerings. This oversight frequently results in suboptimal HCI implementations that not only fall short of meeting tactical enterprise objectives but also create problems that can prevent enterprises from successfully pursuing their hybrid cloud and digital transformation strategies.” — BRAD CASEMORE Research Vice President, Datacenter Networks, IDC The Importance of Integrated Networking to HCI, IDC Opinion June 2017 © PLEXXI, INC. 2018 | WHITE PAPER: PLEXXI HCN™ REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR NUTANIX ENTERPRISE CLOUD | 3 Private Clouds Require a Fresh Approach to Data Center Networking Legacy data center networks can’t meet the increased agility, scalability and price-performance demands of the private cloud. Most incumbent data center networks are based on leaf-spine topologies composed of distinct top-of-rack (ToR) switches and aggregation switches as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2—Traditional Leaf/Spine Topology Spine Layer Leaf ToR These two-tier network designs are inherently inefficient and inflexible. Limitations include: » Network-design Bottlenecks: Most conventional leaf-spine networks are optimized to support traditional north-south traffic flows within the rack. They aren’t well suited for the east-west, cross-rack traffic flows that dominate today’s data centers. Spine-layer contention can lead to latency and timeouts, hindering workload mobility and impairing the performance of scale-out applications. IT planners are forced to limit the placement and interaction of compute and storage resources and workloads based on arbitrary rack boundaries imposed by the network architecture. » Load-balancing Bottlenecks: Most enterprises use rudimentary load distribution protocols like ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Path) to balance traffic across uplinks. ECMP is not application-aware; it arbitrarily distributes traffic based on network costs, without considering an application’s requirements, tendencies or performance characteristics.