Twin Sons of Different Mothers: Latency and Bandwidth

Chris Crosby, CEO, Compass Datacenters

Related, But Not the Same

• Bandwidth• Capacity of the “pipe”

the data is travelling through

• Latency• Function of distance• Time it takes to travel

between 2 points

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The Impact of Latency• Study by Akamai

• 1 second delay in page load speed• 16% drop in customer satisfaction

• Rich packet applications are more demanding• Ex: Netflix

• IoT• “Instantaneous” packet processing• Critical for many applications

• Ex: Real time inventory

• Data reads and writes• No such thing as a multi-availability zone public cloud

database

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The Latency Factors

• Distance and contention

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Latency: Factors• Operational requirements

• Ex: Hypervisors add overhead to transmission speed

• Contention for bandwidth (Public clouds)

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Solving the Latency Issue

• For now it’s geographical• Moving data as close to the end user as

possible• Edge data centers• Emerging

• Micro datacenters• Cisco FOG architecture

• Any device can be a data collection point• Must have computing, storage and network

connectivity

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Insufficient Bandwidth• IDC

• “50% of existing networks will be bandwidth constrained as a result of IoT”

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The Traditional Network• Access via public means

• Internet• Too many “chokepoints”

Source: Forrester

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An Alternative Approach• Presented to a Compass customer

• Direct Peering• Direct cloud connectivity

• Eliminate public internet

Graphics courtesy of Equinix

Internet

Campus

DC1

DC2

AWSEQIX DC

Cloud Exchang

e

Internet Exchang

eI2 Provider

AzureI2

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Eliminate the Internal Bottlenecks• Network only as fast as slowest component

• Backplane contention

• Considerations:• Top of rack switching• Faster switches

• 10, 25, 40, 50, 100GB

Graphic courtesy of Mellanix

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Summary

• Speed of delivery will only continue to grow• Lower latency• Higher bandwidth speeds

• The important question: • Can the network support what you want to do?

• Must eliminate contention/chokepoints• Internal and external• Failure to do so will result in:

• Ineffective operation• Customer dissatisfaction

• Must find partners agile enough to quickly adapt