The revolutionary changes storage underwent in recent years culminated in the explosion of flash, which solved the latency problem. But IT is like a game of whack-a-mole, where once one problem is solved, another pops up to replace it. Now, according to Rich Napolitano, CEO of Plexxi, Inc., that problem is the network — particularly network fluidity.

Napolitano told Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that several factors have made the old network architecture of “platform 2” — a static, hierarchical, north-south paradigm — unsuitable for the latest computing trends. The “platform 3” world is about heavily converged infrastructure, said Napolitano, which requires removal of the fibre channel SAN, and this puts much more pressure on the network to handle traffic.

“The performance of your entire system now is determined by your network,” he said.

Google invests in Plexxi

Napolitano revealed that Google recently decided to invest in Plexxi, in part because it sees the company as the “best in show” as far as flexible networking goes.

“We need networks that can adapt” to today’s data and application demands, he said, adding that Plexxi allows network traffic to travel north, south, east and west, enabling horizontal scaling.

Shaking up the private cloud

Napolitano said Plexxi aims to bring the scale and agility of public cloud to the private cloud sphere. He spoke about cloud builders and cloud architects requiring a top-down approach.

“They’re trying to solve a business problem and use the right technology to solve the problem,” he said. He said north-south, static architecture is “so 20 years ago,” explaining, “In this new world, datasets are so large, they’re growing so quickly, the applications grow so quickly, they all scale horizontally.”

Napalitano said that Plexxi’s biggest customers are in the financial services and government, but they are branching out. They are currently partnering with a fluid data center that he calls “disruptive” for their plans to sell datacenter space on an as-needed basis.

Watch the full video interview below:

Photo by SiliconANGLE