The fundamental nature of data center computing is rapidly changing.

The traditional model of separately provisioned and maintained server, storage, and network resources are constraining data center agility and increasing the operational budgets and killing budgets required to change and grow. It’s a big problem when you have static pools of isolated resources dedicated for infrastructure to support different classes of data center workloads. Often these are underutilized resources and inefficient infrastructure.

One response has been for CIOs is to adopt virtualization and new server units also called blade technologies. These devices enable a more flexible and highly utilized infrastructure. The goals are to dynamically provision networks and services to deliver value to users. The big driver in this is the race to a new infrastructure or cloud computing model.

For many it’s a whole new set of pressures around new kinds of network topologies in the data center that put create complexities in terms of speed and costs.

Key Challenges in the Datacenter
1. Rise of the role of virtual machines is driving much more frequent changes to network configurations

2. Changes in the network design of static gear creates massive coordination using manual labor from multiple IT groups

3. More pressure on servers and network bandwidth for services and delivery of applications to devices

4. Old network topologies and configurations don’t scale with virtualization and can’t provide the kinds of scale performance for dynamic application environments

5. Servers are acting more like network devices but smarter, faster, and cheaper increasing the number of connections to be managed and increasing bandwidth density

New Reality
Network operations groups are racing to build out new data center networks and capacity at a really fast pace. The reality is that network managers require a new network architecture that intelligent and versatile, but the network has to perform faster. As they say doing more with less, and the networks have to be always on and can’t fail.

Convergence is here for the Web, Cloud, and Mobile and the biggest sectors disrupted are networks, compute, and storage. It’s about time.

The application market has shown the way that users want to use technology and now it’s time for the network, server, and storage guys to wake up and get it done with an architecture that enables rapid growth in the new network architecture.