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As applications and IT services advance, scaling and modernizing data centers and meeting increased performance and security requirements grows more and more challenging. While networking technology has evolved over the past decade to provide higher-performing leaf-spine topologies, the unfortunate reality is that associated security and services architectures have not kept pace.

To compensate, many organizations use a stateless data center fabric, bolting on network services and applying complex service chaining — an inefficient solution that delivers sub-par results.

Enterprise organizations that want to compete on the same level as the hyperscalers must shift away from legacy architectures and embrace the next-generation data center fabric. This stateful architecture provides integrated infrastructure services required to secure and scale applications while improving performance and manageability.

Aruba and Pensando Systems have come together to innovate a new category of switches that enables organizations to create hyperscale-like environments in their existing data centers. The Aruba Distributed Services Switch is the game-changing, next-generation data center fabric organizations need to overcome legacy limitations and resolve security and performance issues.

East-West traffic has outgrown current-generation switching technologies

As technologies like edge computing advance, the volume of data requiring processing has surged, prompting enterprise data centers to repurpose traditional firewalls to segment the network. This leads to a number of issues. For example, when a host system in one cabinet needs to interface with another, traffic must be routed to the services host. Unfortunately, this service-chaining approach creates a hair-pinning or trombone effect, resulting in choke points that bog down the network, operations, and performance.

To accommodate traffic and capacity increases, more firewalls must be added, making scaling complex and expensive. The reality is that traditional firewalls designed for North-South traffic fall short when it comes to enforcing East-West traffic policies. Furthermore, traffic from microservices-based applications may never leave a physical host, leading to security blind spots that leave an organization vulnerable to threats.

The next-generation data center fabric: Aruba CX 10000 Series Switch

As East-West traffic continues to expand, organizations must rethink how traffic gets handled in the data center. And that’s what the folks at Aruba and Pensando have done. The Aruba CX 10000 Series Switch combines Aruba data center L2/3 switching technology with the Pensando Elba DPU.

Putting the Pensando Elba DPU on the switch itself addresses the shortcomings of the traditional data center by eliminating the need for manual service chaining. As the industry’s only programmable DPU, the Pensando Elba creates a centralized policy enforcement point and delivers a distributed stateful firewall for East-West traffic. The result is the industry’s only solution of its kind, completely revolutionizing data center fabric and delivering the improved security, performance, and scalability of hyperscalers at a fraction of the cost.

Benefits of the Aruba CX 10000 include:

Zero-trust segmentationMicro- and macro-segmentationPervasive telemetryTraffic flow optimizationIncreased bandwidth and performanceImproved operational efficiency and scalabilityAccelerated provisioningSubstantially reduced capex and opex costs

Streamline and secure your data center with Aruba CX 10000

What’s great about the Aruba CX 10000 is that it allows organizations to use their existing data center architecture. It provides a single pane of glass to manage everything in one place, simplifying administration, security, provisioning, and scaling. Plus, this cost-effective solution costs half to a third of traditional data center switching while delivering far superior performance and ROI.

To learn more about transforming your data center architecture with next-generation data center fabric, contact the experts at GDT.

Data Center

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , ,

By now, you’ve heard the good news: The business world is embracing data-driven decision making and growing their data practices at an unprecedented clip. The pandemic may have forced their hands, but they’ve seen the value of data and will never go back to making decisions based on hunches.

Here is the so-so news: They’re moving so fast that they’ve amassed more data than they can analyze. Organizations, on average manage, 10 times more data than they did five years ago. They are struggling to use their data in a way that is efficient, compliant, intuitive, and secure. 

What if the problem isn’t in the volume of data, but rather where it is located—and how hard it is to gather? After all, the average enterprise has 900 applications, but only one-third of them are connected. Nine out of 10 IT leaders report that these disconnects, or data silos, create significant business challenges.* These commonly include cost inefficiencies, data integration errors, missing, or inaccurate data, and culminate in an overall lack of trust in data.

Therein lies the opportunity that businesses have today. If they connect their siloes and harness the power of data they already gather, they can empower everyone to make data-driven business decisions now and in the future. The way to get there is by implementing an emerging data management design called data fabric. 

What is a data fabric design?

A data fabric is an emerging data management design that allows companies to seamlessly access, integrate, model, analyze, and provision data. Instead of centralizing data stores, data fabrics establish a federated environment and use artificial intelligence and metadata automation to intelligently secure data management. 

As leaders continue to refine strategies to elevate productivity and mature analytics, the data fabric is a single architecture that can address the levels of diversity, distribution, scale, and complexity in an organization’s data assets.

At Tableau, we believe that the best decisions are made when everyone is empowered to put data at the center of every conversation. We’ve infused our values into our platform, which supports data fabric designs with a data management layer right inside our platform, helping you break down silos and streamline support for the entire data and analytics life cycle. 

Tableau helps strike the necessary balance to access, improve data quality, and prepare and model data for analytics use cases, while writing-back data to data management sources. Let’s take a quick look at each of those capabilities.

Analytics data catalog. Review quality and structural information on data and data sources to better monitor and curate for useMetadata management. Surface robust metadata where users need it most across their analytics journey, while ensuring bilateral communication with enterprise toolingData quality and lineage. Monitor data sources according to policies you customize to help users know if fresh, quality data is ready for use. Shine a light on who or what is using specific data to speed up collaboration or reduce disruption when changes happenData modeling. Leverage semantic layers and physical layers to give you more options for combining data using schemas to fit your analysisData preparation. Provide a visual and direct way to combine, shape, and clean data in a few clicksData, security, and resource governance: Nurture data across its lifecycle with policies that remain consistent with every use. Ensure the behaves the way you want it to— especially sensitive data and accessData integration. Gain useful insights from data stored across different platforms and data sources, such as data warehouses, data lakes, and CRMsVirtualization and discovery. Increase understanding of data sets on hand for data integration or data analysisOrchestration. Automate coordination of data happenings, like data quality or flow failures, right in the workflowAugmented analytics. Nurture and use AI to make analytics processes—like data management, data prep, and analysis—easier to complete in a few clicks

The analytics-first approach

Business leaders have long recognized the importance of data analytics to the future of their organizations. International Data Corporation, a global market intelligence firm, reports that 83% CEOs want their organizations to be more data-driven and are investing in growing their Data Cultures. Those who are leading with data are now 23 times more likely to add customers and 1.5 times more likely to grow revenue by 10%. 

As organizations begin their data fabric journey, it’s critical they remain focused on where value is being generated for the business. If this is analytics for you, as it is for most, stay your course. Data fabric implementation will take several years, so it is important to set near-term goals to be able to showcase value and keep stakeholders engaged. 

With Tableau as part of your data fabric design, you can overcome some classic problems that pop up during the last mile of data initiatives. For example: 

Lack of adoption by the business. Rev adoption by thousands of users by working where the business is already working, the platform becomes the collaboration zone or federated environment for business users to access data and governance analysts/IT to implement their enterprise projects Slow implementation of governance standards. Create trust and verifiability where viewers consume their data. Tableau provides information in context around data freshness, certification status, data quality warnings, field definitions, data sources, and overall usageLoss of visibility after data leaves EDW. The beauty of data today is that it can be used in so many different ways—which is also a challenging pitfall for governance. With metrics on who is consuming data and how data consumers are interacting with data, IT can get true insight into what data sources are providing the most value and discover and remediate sensitive data use automatically 

Learn more about data fabric design, and explore Forrester’s take on the data fabric market by reading “Now Tech: Data Fabric Vendors Q1 ’22.” 

Data Governance