Preparing the Network for the Surge in AI Workloads

Network newbies, aficionados, and professionals! Lend me your ear. There are things afoot that will have a profound impact on your stomping ground, the network. There is a ton of focus on generative AI and the applications being built to leverage it. Studies abound about what those applications look like, what frameworks they're using, and what services to use. I have some of that data myself.

But what isn’t being talked about (enough) is the impact these applications are going to have on the backbone of business. You know, the network. It wasn’t surprising to learn that only 50% of respondents to a network-oriented survey said network planning was something their company engaged in.

That’s problematic because there are things afoot in business that indicate data center networks—the ones you operate and oversee daily—are about to get inundated with new workloads that will have great implications on data center networks.

AI Workloads Coming Home

Yes, that's what all that talk about repatriation really means. If workloads are coming home, they need a place to stay and hallways to roam around in the middle of the night. Our own research indicates a significant rise (from 13% in 2021 to 50% in 2024) of organizations that have or plan to repatriate workloads.

And here's the thing: If Barclay’s CIO Survey from the first half of 2024 is correct, the workloads coming home are all about data. Both storage and database workloads were the top workloads moving from the public cloud to a data center near you.

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