Building the Data Center Network of the Future

It’s no secret that the way the data center network is viewed is changing drastically. The network of the future will be completely automated, and its capabilities will have little to do with the kinds of physical boxes with Ethernet cable ports.

Hyperscale data center operators have already figured out that the best way to make the network more flexible is to divorce the control plane from the forwarding plane; the best way to automate it is by doing away with proprietary vendor software and replacing it with open Linux-based operating systems and tools, leveraging their developer muscle; the best way to reduce the cost of networking hardware is to use custom-designed boxes look less like networking switches and more like servers.

Telcos have figured out that the only way they can serve the changing market needs is to build networks that can be reconfigured via software tools. They’ve also figured out that there is a huge market opportunity in selling network functions, which used to be locked in individual physical boxes, as software services. Needless to say, doing both of those things requires building a whole new kind of network, a network that resembles the networks those hyperscale data center companies have built a lot more than the traditional telco networks in use today.

These are the topics we focused on in July, as we explored how the Data Center Network of the Future is being built today:

CORD for Telcos Now a Linux Project With Google Backing - The biggest consumer of computing power by volume may very well be the telecommunications industry. In recent years, the world’s major telcos have been desperately urging engineers and developers to build a real cloud that works for them — one that can be staged, provisioned, and orchestrated like a common enterprise data center. Just bigger.

Aligned Adds SDN Dimension to On-Demand Data Center - Aligned Data Centers, the New York-based data center provider that has found a way to address the problem of elasticity in the least elastic component of any data center – the power and cooling infrastructure – is taking things a step further by offering clients what its management believes is the most forward-looking approach to introducing elasticity to network provisioning.

Navigating the Data Center Networking Landscape - Today’s networking layer has become one of the most advanced infrastructure components in the data center. We are far beyond simple network route tables and ensuring data traffic patterns. Now, we’re creating contextual policies around information, users, applications, and entire cloud infrastructure components. We’ve created automation at the networking layer; and have even completely abstracted the data and control plane via next-generation SDN.