The Data Center Network Evolution: Five Reasons This Isn't Your Dad's Network

Infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams are facing a difficult challenge in the data center: tossing out the rules of networking architecture. After years of just "throwing bandwidth" at the problem, today's I&O teams are finding they need to build fundamentally different networks that accommodate advances in server virtualization and storage networking and pave the path to cloud computing. Today's traditional three-tiered architectures are giving way to flatter, converged Ethernet fabrics. Why? A fabric-based approach provides the necessary flexibility, performance, and reliability to support new shared resources, software, and data models. The goal of data center convergence and virtualization is to remove redundancy in SAN networks and inefficiencies in the compute spectrum and offer them from an information grid, AKA "the cloud." This requires transforming today's bloated and static network into a dynamic, efficient, automated, and high-throughput entity. To do this, organizations need to deploy a fabric architecture, embracing five new investments: virtual switches, hybrid switches (software and hardware), converged switching architecture, meshed topologies, and automation.