Closing the network automation gap

Infoblox has announced that Tolly Group, an independent IT testing firm, has found that automation of core network services—DNS, DHCP and IP addresses (DDI)—can reduce the deployment time for virtual machines in a VMware private cloud environment by 62%.

The report is available now for free at www.infoblox.com/tolly-cloud.

Private clouds are rapidly emerging as the infrastructure platform of choice for many organisations because of the speed and versatility they offer in launching new services. Many organisations are now moving mission-critical applications onto these private clouds. When provisioning new resources such as virtual machines (VMs), network setup is often a choke point, hobbled by manual processes that cause delays, require hand-offs across multiple IT teams, and introduce errors.

To clearly quantify this network automation gap, and shed light on the impact of lost time and productivity, Infoblox commissioned a study by Tolly Group, a third-party certification and testing firm. This test, conducted by Tolly engineers, measured the time required for discovering, tracking, provisioning, and destroying VMs with IP addresses and DNS records in a VMware private cloud when using manual processes in comparison to the new Infoblox Cloud Network Automation.

Here are some of the results as documented in the report:

• The time to inventory, create, and destroy 500 VMs per week in Tolly’s test environment—designed to mimic a real-world large enterprise—dropped from 42 hours when using manual processes to just 16 hours with Infoblox. This is a reduction of 62%, and doesn’t include any time saved from not having to resolve outages due to errors from manually tracking IP addresses and DNS records.
• Discovering network information for 20 existing VMs—such as virtual datacenter location, virtual cluster location, and tenant IDs—took 17 minutes manually and just 45 seconds with Infoblox.
• Finding available IP addresses when all the addresses in a typical subnet are taken required two minutes manually and only 30 seconds with Infoblox.

“Today, network configuration tasks for private cloud are labour intensive, prone to error, and ultimately don’t keep pace with other cloud automation tasks. Simply put, manual tasks and processes such as creating networks, assigning and tracking IP addresses, and provisioning DNS records is a major bottleneck. While server and storage parameters can be configured and spun up in minutes, network setup tasks can take hours or days,” said Kevin Tolly, founder of Tolly Group. “Solutions such as Infoblox Cloud Network Automation close the gap to enable faster, more reliable deployment of cloud environments and overall improvement in IT agility.”

“While many organisations understand the value of network automation in private cloud deployments, it’s been a challenge to quantify the benefit,” said Arya Barirani, vice president of product marketing at Infoblox. “Tolly Group did an excellent job in conducting a set of sophisticated tests to show the time and cost impacts and how network automation is essential to private cloud and next-genearation data centre deployments.”