As the saying goes; good things come in pairs. That couldn’t be more true when it comes to the intersection of the physical and virtual worlds through digital twins.
Let’s start with what Digital twins are. Visualise a virtual replica of physical objects or systems. With a digital twin in place, businesses can simulate and optimise their performance in a sandbox virtual environment.
The concept of digital twins was introduced in the aerospace and engineering fields, where the first digital twin was created in the early 2000s by Dr. Michael Grieves at the University of Michigan to help NASA improve the design and operation of spacecraft. Today, the concept of a digital twin has expanded to many other industries, such as manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and more, with the global digital twin market projected to reach USD 73.5 billion by 2027 at a CAGR of 60.6%. In the networking industry, digital twin technology has the potential to become a game-changer. It brings many benefits, creating a safe sandbox environment for network change validation, stress testing, failover simulations, and training. This can save organisations time and money, reduce risks, and help IT teams optimise network performance.
Turning our attention to the enterprise networking industry, the impact of digital twin technology will be felt in several areas.
Network Staging:Â A networking digital twin enables users to build their infrastructure in demo mode and digitally place their network devices to test them before deployment in real-time, shaving weeks off the typical deployment process. This virtual sandbox environment enables users to test options in advance of deployment, saving time and money. For example, instead of waiting for orders to ship, IT teams can deploy various network devices in different topologies and evaluate network performance to optimise it and speed up the deployment when hardware is delivered.
Network stress testing: Simulating traffic load on a network in real life can be challenging. With digital twin technology, users can replicate scenarios to see how the network would handle such traffic loads. Â Let us take a sports stadium Wi-Fi network as an example. Testing 50,000 visitor devices connecting simultaneously to the stadium Wi-Fi network is almost impossible in real life. However, that scenario can be easily replicated within a digital twin of the network. You can even take a step further and test various scenarios of end-user devices, types of applications, usage patterns, and predict user experience.
Network Failover testing: Another area where digital twin technology excels is failover testing. Anticipating issues with network failures such as data centre redundancy is complicated to test in real life, but with digital twin technology, it can be replicated seamlessly and without accidentally impacting users.
Network change validation. This is where the concept of digital twin truly shines. Critical networks cannot become test beds for new software or services, as the risks are too great. The traditional route for customers was to procure additional networking devices, network controllers and management products and deploy a duplicate network in the lab. Then they would manually copy the network configuration, firmware versions, clients, and applications in the lab environment to test the new designs. But with digital twin technology, users can perform digital “what-ifs” without risking the operation of their current network or the cost of duplicating it, reducing IT expenses and saving time when it comes to network upgrades or new service rollouts.
Training: Engineers can learn by engaging with their actual network infrastructure twin, without the risk of impacting live traffic or the hassle of assembling piles of hardware to create a duplicate network.
Having been part of the evolution of the networking industry over the past 20 years, I have witnessed first-hand the remarkable progress from the days of traditional legacy networks. I am really excited about how the application of digital twins will mark a new chapter in our journey.
So, when it comes to digital twins, another saying holds true. Two really is better than one!
