"As more and more data centers open their doors in Asia, the data center itself is changing again." Karl Horne, Chief Technology Officer-Asia Pacific,Ciena

Businesses are moving some of their data processing to the cloud, while application providers offer more innovative and customer-friendly cloud-based services. As a result, demand for data centers based in the cloud is starting to pick up at the expense of enterprise data center capacity growth. Another driver of this trend is that CIOs in the region are expecting more from their data center investments. According to a recent study by IQPC, 42 percent of Asian enterprises planned to begin or continue investing in data center optimization tools in 2011.

Cloud use in Asia is steadily expanding to enterprise and government, offering on-demand access to elastic pooled resources.

Enterprises are evolving their data centers through consolidation, virtualization, data protection and taking their first step toward cloud services. Moving costs from less-flexible capital expenses to on-demand operating expenses is a strong driver for the uptake of cloud-based data center infrastructure services.

This evolution has in part driven the creation of the virtual data center architecture interconnected with a cloud backbone network. Multiple data centers can be connected to enable workload orchestration, traffic generation, and flow. The physical walls of individual data centers are effectively broken down to create a virtual data center capacity encompassing multiple physical ones.

Data Center without walls

Data center without walls describes an architecture that creates a multi-data center, in a hybrid cloud environment, to function as one virtual data center to address any magnitude of workload demand and offer seamless workflow movement. It enables effective asset pooling among data centers to deliver resource efficiencies, as well as increased resiliency and performance gains over isolated data center architectures. These hybrid cloud architectures will extend improvement in enterprise economics by enabling IT enterprises to achieve 25 percent reduction in IT services and hardware expenses promised from cloud adoption.

However, for enterprise-level performance, we also need to consider the network that connects the data centers and how these inter-data center networks must become more intelligent to support seamless cloud-based use. While it is inevitable that more and more organizations use the cloud to send and store data, it is simplistic to assume that preparing the network is just a matter of increasing its capacity for bandwidth. An intelligent cloud network would include:

• A cloud backbone network that provides assured service performance while minimizing latency and maintaining a consistent high-level operation - at an optimum cost
• Performance on-demand to efficiently accommodate variable and unpredictable traffic loads
• Network hypervisor - a management software to align network resources between data centers for improved economics and application performance

As the data center without walls concept matures for workload orchestration, the distinction between the enterprise and cloud data centers will continue to blur, allowing enterprises to interconnect cloud resources with greater efficiency and performance.